


Carry Us to Victory

by Bespectacled_Panda



Category: PBG Hardcore
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, I apologize for how long this is, M/M, Self-Esteem Issues, also McJones is here too but he doesn't do enough to warrant a character tag, cc ily 💞, her name isn't Dressler anymore but that's how it is here so I guess I'll go with that, how do I tag Lucah, minecraft fanfiction unlocks a part of my soul I think, this was written for a secret santa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-21
Updated: 2020-01-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:49:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22341283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bespectacled_Panda/pseuds/Bespectacled_Panda
Summary: They can’t do it. They’ll never do it. They’re kidding themselves, waking up every morning and going outside to tend to the farm and slay some monsters and sending two people on yet another exploration mission that’ll most likely be fruitless as always.But all they know how to do is carry on anyway.---Or, the regulars are gone, and Ian is losing hope.
Relationships: Ian MacLeod/Luke Sizemore
Comments: 8
Kudos: 6





	Carry Us to Victory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [idontknowhowtoread (heatherpotts)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heatherpotts/gifts).



> This was written as a gift for idontknowhowtoread (heatherpotts) AKA cc as part of an Asagao Academy discord server secret santa event! She very graciously gave me permission to post this & share it with the rest of the world, so here it is! I wrote this in like two weeks, most of which was spent crying & furiously typing at three in the morning while watching Gibi ASMR's pomodoro video, but it was a lot of fun even though I was stressed a lot!
> 
> (Also, I just have to say that if you haven't read any of cc's stuff, you absolutely have to go fix that immediately. She is so insanely talented, like I wish I had even a _fraction_ of the writing talent she has. Every word that comes out of her is pure gold. Seriously, you won't regret picking up any one of her works. Trust me on that one.)
> 
> This isn't set in any existing minecraft hc season, I just kind of had fun making up something for the sake of the story. (But @ Todd and/or PBG can we PLEASE get a season with Luke, Ian, & Lucah all together? Or, maybe I should say, can we please get a new season of hardcore at all? I miss it so much :orb:)
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoy this! It's way way too long, but this is who I am I guess. I routinely lose control of my life while writing.

Ian’s foot sinks into the marsh with a _slorsh._

“Oh shit.”

He quickly jumps backwards, but it’s too late; his pant leg is already thoroughly soaked, the fabric matted to his skin all the way up his calf. “ _God_ ,” he grumbles, staring down at his muck-covered shoe and ankle. “I hate this.”

“Yo, Ian, you okay?” Luke calls from up ahead, turning around, but there’s a hint of laughter in his voice.

“Yeah.” Ian sighs heavily. “I’m alright.”

After a moment, raking his hair back out of his eyes, he resumes trudging forward, trying to be a little more careful about where he walks this time. His one, sodden boot _squelch_ es noisily with every step he takes. Awesome. His boots hadn’t even finished fully drying from _yesterday’s_ stepping-in-a-foot-deep-puddle-of-pond-scum.

This is definitely the worst place they’ve ever lived.

He still really doesn’t get why they just _had_ to stay in this stupid swamp. It’s damp, it’s ugly, and it constantly stinks like low tide, and frankly, Ian was ready to get the hell out of it five minutes after he first woke up here, face-down in a damp patch of grass. But the moment he voiced the slightest complaint, Austin, Jeff, Dean, and McJones all started yelling over each other about how i _t’d be a waste of daylight_ and _swamps have good resources like wild mushrooms and fossils_ and blah, blah, blah, a bunch of stuff Ian didn’t really listen to. And those four are the ones who actually know what’s going on here, so he just figured they had some kind of expert knowledge that he didn’t. But now, a month or so later, he’s finally beginning to put the pieces together and realize that their _expert knowledge_ probably just boiled down to them not wanting to do the work of walking through the entire swamp to find somewhere better to settle. Which, like, Ian _does_ appreciate the art of not doing work, but he also equally appreciates the art of not living in literal fucking swamp water. They had to build their house on fucking stilts.

But whatever, here they are. Ian’s sort of adjusted to it after living here for a month and some change, but it still kinda really sucks. And it might be just his imagination—his dislike of the pukey-green grass and the dingy lakes turning itself into something more—but it feels like there’s so much less excitement than there usually is. They’ve gone mining, _yeah_ , and they’ve built this whole farm, _yeah_ , and they even went to the Nether, _yeah_. On paper, nothing’s different about this world from any other one. But somehow, when Ian thinks back on all they’ve accomplished thus far, he feels like he’s mostly just spent his days ambling through the endless swamp, looking for whatever it is they need to find now.

Actually, though, their luck was good today. They had a breakthrough, the first one they’ve had in a long, long time. A couple of hours after they set out this morning, they came to a spruce forest they’d never seen before—a welcome break in the swampland to say the least. And just a few minutes after they slipped into the depths of the trees, they quite literally stumbled upon a village. Which was a massive relief, because they’d spent the past _five days_ wandering aimlessly through the swamp in search of one.

From there, it was just the matter of finding a cartographer and finding out what he was willing to trade them. And now, they’re finally returning back home, coming as the bearers of _good_ news for once in their lives. It’s late; the spruce forest and the village it holds are pretty damn far from their house. The sun is setting as they walk, glinting deep orange and scarlet red off the boggy grass and fetid water beneath their shoes. Luke’s a few steps ahead of Ian, and Ian can’t help but notice how the sunset frames him perfectly, backlighting him, giving him an otherworldly, almost godly appearance. He thinks Luke might appreciate that visual, and he almost calls out to let him know. But something—maybe weariness, maybe something else—keeps him from summoning the strength to spit the words out, so he just lets them linger, forever unsaid, on his tongue.

By the time their little swamp home pops back into view, the sun is all but gone, replaced by the rapidly rising moon. Their house, though, is like a second sun in the darkness, the torches they’ve stuck on all the outside walls lighting up the night brilliantly. As Ian and Luke approach, the front door suddenly swings open, and Lucah materializes in the threshold.

“Welcome back, boys!” she singsongs to them. “Find anything good?”

“Oh, yeah, it was awesome!” Luke says in answer. “You’ll never believe it; we finally found a village! We talked to the cartography guy, and he’s gonna sell us a map to a woodland mansion!”

“ _Really?!_ That’s great news! I was worried we were gonna have to track the mansion down ourselves!”

Her and Luke’s matching grins are blinding, and Ian finds himself breaking into a small smile as well. Lucah steps aside and holds out a hand to usher them in, and they carefully slide off their soaked boots and leave them just inside the doorway. They then pad into the dining room after her, where Ian and Luke plop down at the table to give their legs a much-needed rest. Lucah, on the other hand, stays standing, resting her arms on the back of one of the chairs.

“I made some vegetable stew earlier if you’d like me to heat some up for you guys,” she offers.

“That sounds great!” Luke replies brightly. “Thank you so much, Lucah. You really don’t have to spoil us like this.”

“No, no, I don’t mind at all. I like housewife-ing it sometimes. I’m kind of a rotten cook, so it’s nice to practice my skills whenever I can.” Lucah snickers at herself, drumming her fingernails on the chair.

“Aw, I like your cooking, though.”

“Well, thank you!”

“But hey, if you want, you could always ask Hammy for some lessons whenever you see him again. He’s a pro.”

“Ha! Maybe I will!”

Lucah turns away, heading over to their food chest. She heaves the lid open, lifts out the pot of soup, and sets it on top of the furnace to the side. Then, she glides over to the ore chest, probably looking for coal to light the furnace with, Ian would guess. He stifles a yawn into the back of his fist as he watches her work. He’s been gradually getting more and more tired all day, but now that he’s finally safe at home and able to relax, he’s completely wiped, like everything’s hit him all at once. It also probably doesn’t help that he hasn’t been sleeping so well the past couple nights.

He glances back up at the sound of crackling fire to find that the furnace has been brought to life, orange flames dancing in the belly of the stone frame. Chair legs scrape across the floor as Lucah finally takes a seat across from him and Luke, chilling while she waits for the soup to warm.

“Hey, Lucah,” Luke says, then, breaking the silence. Lucah looks at him, her almondy brown eyes gone curious at his serious tone.

“Yeah?”

“How is he?”

And Lucah’s face instantly clouds over, her eyebrows lowering and her smile vanishing away to a tight-lipped frown. “Not…not good,” she murmurs. “Not worse, I don’t think. He was awake earlier, when I popped in to check on him. And he seemed to be in pretty good spirits, but…”

“…Man.” Luke shakes his head soberly. “This sucks.”

“Yeah.”

It’s a cold, cold reminder that, as much as luck was on their side today, things are not good.

They started this world off with seven people, just like usual. A fine number, a perfect amount to close out victory with at least _a few_ survivors. But things never turn out the way they seem like they should. They were just a week or so in when Dean, Jeff, and Lucah went out to hunt for food. And, in their search, the three of them happened upon a small beach, a rare strip of sand amongst all the swampy grass, with a couple of sugarcane plants growing on it. Understanding the immense value of sugarcane for the enchanting they were eventually going to be doing, Jeff and Dean immediately went to uproot it and take it home. But the moment they dug their shovels into the sand, something happened.

A cave-in. The sand from that oh-so-innocent-looking beach suddenly giving way into the massive ravine concealed below.

It was a long drop, Lucah said after the fact, her face still colored bone-white. Far too deep for anyone to even _attempt_ going down there to retrieve them. So the remaining five of them just built two empty graves and left Dean and Jeff’s bodies to rot at the bottom of the ravine.

Austin they lost a while later, when they were in the Nether. He tangled with a wither skeleton, tried taking it on one against one. But it caught him off guard and ran him right through with its stone sword, killing him almost instantly. Even if he did survive being gored, though, he would’ve been dead in mere minutes from the wither poison anyway. Once again, there was nothing any of them could have done to save him.

But even still, though, escaping the Nether with four people left alive is pretty good. They still had a shot at victory, and they knew it. They even murmured it themselves as they dug Austin’s grave, trying to buoy their spirits: _We still got this_.

And then, just a few short days later, McJones got sick.

It happened so quickly. A mysterious, horrible illness snuck up on him and absolutely walloped him. In a matter of hours, he went from completely fine to so feverish it seemed he was about to pass out at any moment. In a desperate attempt to cure him, the others gave him food, water, milk, even potions of healing and regeneration that they hastily whipped up in the brewing stand. But nothing worked. All he did was get sicker and sicker until he was almost completely bedridden, lacking the strength to stand up for more than a few minutes at a time. When it finally became clear that there was nothing they could do to help him, they just built him a private bedroom—a half-quarantined sick room, really. And it’s there that he stays, curled up under three or so blankets, spending his days drifting in and out of delirious sleep. He looks like death, he sounds like death, he says he _feels_ like death, but somehow, by some miracle, he’s not dead yet.

It wouldn’t make a different if he was, though, as cruel as that is to say. In the dictionary sense, he’s alive, but functionally, he may as well be six feet under right alongside his brother and his friends. He can tell the three of them how to craft certain tools or where to look to find certain resources, but that’s about it. His knowledge and advice are of _some_ worth to them, sure, but what they really could use is an extra body, an extra set of hands, an extra pair of eyes. Information can only go so far.

“I’m essentially a brain in a box at this point,” is how he put it once, his voice so hoarse and grating that it actually hurt to hear. Ian sputtered out a dry laugh at that, but he was the only one; Luke and Lucah just continued to solemnly look down at the McJones’s curled-up form, almost completely buried under his blankets.

Now, they all find themselves casting forlorn glances, brimming with _what could have been_ , at the door to McJones’s sick room.

“…What are we going to do about _that?_ ” Ian asks after a long moment.

“Oh, c’mon, don’t talk about him like that,” Lucah says kind of snappishly, turning a stern Mom-stare on Ian. “It’s not his fault he’s sick. I feel bad for him.”

“No, I know, I—I don’t mean him, exactly. I mean _that whole situation._ We’re—” Ian holds out his hands, “we’re clearly gonna have to leave him here. When we go to the mansion.”

“Yeah, we definitely can’t bring him with us when we go. We’re on our own in this one,” Luke echoes.

“Oh, yes, right. I…y’know, I was really hoping he was going to get better, but…” Lucah shakes her head slowly, slouching forward onto their elbows, cupping her hands over her mouth. “…I think that ship has sailed.”

The three of them look around the table at each other. But there’s no sense of outrage or bitterness or even sadness there between them. There’s only resignation. Resignation to their fate.

Perhaps that’s another reason why Ian feels so bored, so listless all the time here: They’re all so utterly devoid of hope. _Everything’s_ devoid of hope, really. The others all died so abruptly and in such quick succession, and now all that’s left is the three of them. The three newbies, sort of. The ones who have no idea what the hell they’re doing. And yet somehow, they’re expected to fight their way through to the end despite the odds against them stacking higher and higher with every day that goes by.

And, in that moment, Ian feels any trace of relief or happiness he might have picked up from today’s victory just… _vanish_. Because—finding a village might have been a victory, sure, but it’s a very, very hollow one. Really, when he thinks about it in the whole grand scheme of this world, it doesn’t mean anything at all.

They can’t do it. They’ll never do it. They’re kidding themselves, waking up every morning and going outside to tend to the farm and slay some monsters and sending two people on yet another exploration mission that’ll most likely be fruitless as always. They’re not the capable ones here. They’re not the leaders. They’re supposed to have the regulars there to lean on when they going gets tough. There’s no way they’re not going to die the moment they step foot in that woodland mansion—or even just on the _journey_ to the mansion. This is fucking pointless.

But all they know how to do is carry on anyway.

\---

A few minutes later, Lucah declares the soup to be sufficiently warmed, and she ladles Ian and Luke each a heaping bowl of it. She then places their bowls in front of them on the table like a waitress and returns to her chair on the opposite side of the table.

“Well, anyway, tell me about this village you guys found!” she says, her voice soaring back up to her more usual, upbeat tone. The air among them seems to a loosen a bit under her cheerful words, the futility of their circumstances slipping to the backs of their minds for the time being.

“Well—” Luke starts, and then his eyes dart over to Ian. “Yo, Ian, do you wanna tell this story?”

“I…sure. I mean, it’s not a very good story—” Ian dips his spoon into the piping-hot soup, “—but okay. It’s…I dunno, it’s a village. You’ve seen villages.” Ian breaks into a sudden giggle, and he turns sharply towards Luke. “Wait, why the hell am _I_ telling this? You do it! I’m an awful storyteller.”

Luke laughs. “No way, I like listening to you talk, man! You’ve got a nice voice for storytelling. Keep going!”

“Aww,” says Lucah, pulling at a lock of her orange hair.

The soup spills off Ian’s spoon and splashes back into the bowl. “Oh, uh,” he mumbles, licking his lips. “Thanks.” His chest prickles in a very, very uncomfortable manner, and the tips of his fingers start to tremble. “A-anyway, so, uh. We went to the village, and we found a cartographer who’ll sell us a woodland mansion map for fourteen emeralds and a compass.”

Lucah nods thoughtfully. “Alright, okay! That’s not that bad, is it?”

“I dunno. It seems okay.” Ian pulls his legs up onto the seat of his chair criss-cross-applesauce. “The emeralds are the biggest problem, ‘cause, like, I remember like Austin or someone saying something about how those don’t show up anywhere but in the mountains.”

“Yeah,” Luke puts in simply, offering a nod of his own.

“So what we did is we went around and found _another_ villager—a stone mason dude—who’ll trade us emeralds for ten clay balls each.”

“Oh, I see! So you’re going to do a series of trades, then,” Lucah says. “The clay for the emeralds, and then the emeralds for the map.”

“Uh-huh. It’s not…y’know, that’s not the most efficient way, but it works, I guess.”

Honestly, villagers kinda creep Ian out. He just doesn’t like them. They’re all stout and squat, with tanned, tawny skin; bald heads; long noses; and weird, full-body robes in various colors. They scuttle all around on these short little legs, grunting and _hm_ -ing constantly from every direction. And plus, Ian’s just not sure where they fall on the consciousness scale. They seem to understand English just fine, which indicates their brains are on the same level as humans’—or are they actually also humans themselves?—but at the same time, there’s just something… _off_ about them. They creep him out, and in his opinion, the less time spent around them, the better.

“What about the compass, though?” Lucah asks, then.

“What about it? That’s not that hard to make.”

“I know, but do we have any redstone?”

“…Oh.”

Luke frowns. “Oh, man, you’re right, I don’t think we do. We’ll have to go mining for it, I guess.”

“Well.” Ian wheezes a little bit, resting his chin in his hand. “I guess maybe this wasn’t a good plan.”

“No, no, it’s alright, I think it’ll still work,” Lucah assures him quickly. “We’ll just have to mine, like Luke said. And the clay shouldn’t be too much of an issue to get.”

“Yeah. There’s a ton of clay around here; like, I see it in the bottom of all the, like, swamp puddles or whatever. But, okay, the problem is, what the hell does _clay ball_ mean? Like, how much clay per ball?”

“Well, the villager guy showed us, remember?” Luke points out. “It was about the size of the palm of our hand. I think we’ll be okay if we just eyeball it.”

“I hope.”

Lucah gives a small, tender smile. “Hey, this is good, guys! Look at us; we’re making progress! I’m really proud of you guys that you got all this done just today. You two have been the real fucking MVPs over here. I really haven’t done shit, have I?” She laughs in a kind of breathy way.

“Oh, no, Lucah, you’ve done plenty. We really appreciate you. But I’m just happy that we won’t have to spend all day walking for a while now,” Luke says with a tired smile.

“Oh god, yeah, I’m sure you are!”

Ian and Luke spend the next couple of minutes polishing off their bowls of soup. Then, once they’re through, they all go re-relay the tale of their adventures to McJones. Or, rather, Lucah re-relays the tale of their adventures to McJones, while Ian and Luke stay outside and listen in through the ajarred door. McJones is pretty insistent that everyone stays away from him so that they don’t get sick too, but Lucah, in all her motherly instinct, never listens to him.

“Sounds like we have no other choice,” Ian hears him say in between coughing fits once she’s finished running through their plan with the trading. “Villages are really rare, so we can’t exactly go looking for another one just to get better trades. And even if we _were_ to find some mountains somewhere, mining for emerald is a nightmare; trust me on that one.”

He’s speaking from experience. Ian remembers hearing something about this one world a little while back. For whatever reason, McJones and Dean had to go mining for emerald themselves, and McJones somehow ended up dying. Ian doesn’t know the specific details—both McJones and Dean are weirdly avoidant of the topic—but, frankly, Ian can’t think of a lamer way to go.

But either way, they have the full approval of their only regular, so that means their plan is officially locked in. With that taken care of, Lucah announces that she’s heading off to the bedroom to turn in early. Ian and Luke, on the other hand, stay up for a while longer, hanging around in the small dining room to unwind a little after their taxing day of walking the swamps.

As Luke looks through their minuscule collection of books to find some suitable reading material, Ian shuffles over to their miscellaneous chest—named for its status as container of all their random junk they don’t feel like sorting—and starts to dig around in it. He pushes aside a tangled wad of spider string, some loose slimeballs rolling around, a couple of gold ingots, and a glass bottled filled with green dye before landing on what he wants: a couple rumpled pieces of parchment. He gingerly extracts one of them and lets the chest lid slam shut again.

He spreads the paper out on the table where he’s already set his inkwell and quill. Across from him, Luke is now fully engrossed in a book, and Ian’s eyes linger for a moment on his face before he lowers himself gently into his chair, careful not to bump the table and jostle his inkwell. Letting out a quiet breath, he reaches out, dips the quill into the inkwell, and holds it for a moment to let a few excess drips fall off. And then, he presses the tip to the parchment and starts to draw.

Drawing with ink and a quill is hard. Way harder than Ian expected it would be when he started out. You have to be firm and decisive with your lines, which are two things Ian is not, especially when he’s drawing. He prefers to be hesitant and timid and always rely on the ability to erase and try again if he fucks up. But there’s no erasing ink, so he has no choice but to just go for it. To take the plunge and not look back.

He dips his quill again and makes another sharp line, delighting in the skritchy sound of the tip dragging along the parchment. He’s drawing a leaf, he’s decided. He’s not sure what kind of leaf exactly, just a leaf. Teardrop-shaped with serrated edges and a thin, curving stem. He’s kind of a big fan of nature art; plants are just so gorgeous and intricate, and something about the fact that their beauty is completely natural just kinda grabs him by the soul a little bit. Maybe it’s how they remind him that humans are merely guests in Mother Nature’s domain. That there’s a force so much bigger than them out there.

Either way, it’s shockingly hard to capture the true essence of flora on paper, but he’s gotten better over time with practice. Plus, with all the different worlds they’ve bounced in and out of, there’s no shortage of unique landscapes to inspire him. Although this time around, he’d describe the surrounding swampland as less _inspiring_ and more just _awful_.

With a flick of his wrist, he forms the midrib of the leaf, running through from the base to the tip. His hand trembles a little bit as he goes, giving a slight wobble to the line that he really doesn’t care for. He frowns at it for a moment, rubbing his jawline, before reaching for the inkwell again.

His hair’s tumbling into his eyes. He runs his already-inkstained fingers through it, pulling it messily over his shoulder in a twist. And when he looks up with a blink, he finds Luke staring at him. Or, more specifically, staring at his paper.

“Did you just draw that?” Luke says, pointing with his chin towards the leaf.

“Uh. Yeah.”

“Holy flip, you’re talented, man.”

Ian shrugs a little bit by way of response, glancing down at his leaf. It looks alright, in his opinion. The ink has started to bleed slightly at the edges, forming tiny lines in the paper that he thinks are super cool. But overall—eh, not his best work, he has to say.

“You should hang that up on the wall,” Luke adds suddenly, and Ian flinches.

“ _What?_ I—no, I don’t think—” he stammers, “—I don’t know about that.”

“Why not? The walls are kinda bare around here. I think it would look nice.”

“Yeah, but, it’s just…”

Ian can feel Luke staring curiously at him. His fingers clamp around his elbows.

“I’m just kinda not…y’know. Not good at art.”

Luke smiles, his eyebrows crooking with kindness and concern blended together. “Aw, c’mon, man, don’t gimme that! You’re _really_ good!”

“Well, I—th-thanks, but…yeah. No. I guess I don’t have the confidence to just…” Ian tries to make a gesture, but it falls flat, so he just leaves his hand hanging limply in the air. “I’m not there yet. Yeah.”

“Well, that’s fair.” Luke leans back, lacing his fingers behind his head. “But just so you know, you seriously are crazy good at drawing. You definitely got the juice, Ian.”

He looks at Ian, continuing to smile, his eyes crinkled warmly and his lips showing a flash of teeth. And Ian, sitting there, still with his arms wrapped around himself, feels his heart miss a beat and a half. He lowers his head quickly, his chest tightening and his cheeks tingling with an almost-hotness. “Thanks,” he mumbles again, tugging at a loose piece of his hair. And out of the corner of his eye, he sees Luke mercifully go back to reading his book, and a rush of relief courses through him.

Ian thinks love is a bunch of horseshit.

Love cheats at chess. It plays tricks on you, messes with your mind. It comes up behind you and slams you across the head with a pickaxe and stabs your heart right out from beneath your ribs while you’re unconscious, leaving you to nurse a bloody hole in your chest you barely have a hope of healing.

It’s the absolute fucking worst. What’s even the point, anyway? You catch feelings, but the other guy doesn’t return them, so then you just have to sit and stew in them until the end of time—or at least until you start crushing on someone _else_ unattainable, and the cycle starts over again. But in the meanwhile, every time you lay eyes on him, it’s like you’re dying. You’re dying, dying, dying just from the sight of him. Standing there, hovering there, and just desperately craving _something_ you can hardly put words to. Wondering if he knows you feel like this about him—almost _hoping_ he does but still being too goddamn afraid to reach out, because it’s so horribly likely that he doesn’t think about you the same way you do about him. So you just sit by and mentally plead with him to reach out to you first, to pull you aside and say, _Hey, I have feelings for you_ , so you can smile with relief and answer, _I do too_ , even though you know that’ll never happen in a million fucking years. And you just _know_ you’re going to end up watching him fall for someone else if you stay stagnant like this. But you don’t know what’s worse, confessing and being rejected or saying absolutely nothing and watching him slip away.

Ian would very much like to get rid of this stupid, annoying, _persistent_ crush on Luke he’s somehow picked up along the way like a nasty case of Athlete’s Foot, but he can’t. He’s stuck with it, stuck always catching himself staring at Luke, stuck feeling his heart stumble whenever Luke gets close to him, stuck drowning in Luke’s smiley eyes and his hearty laugh and his face and his voice and his _fucking everything_.

This sucks.

He only realizes he’s been clutching his quill poised in the air when a fat drop of ink suddenly and noisily splats onto the corner of the paper.

“Oops.”

Quickly, Ian reaches out and tries to scrub it away with the heel of his hand, but all that does is smear it further across the parchment—not to mention across his skin. So, reluctantly, he just lets it be and returns to sketching out the veins of the leaf.

He loses track of time as he works, forming the faint, tiny lines stretching all throughout the broad part of the leaf. Leaning in until his nose is almost touching the ink to inspect his strokes. Twisting his paper around and going at it from another angle. And, when he’s finally satisfied with the linework, starting in on the shading. He’s gone for stippling this time—pressing tiny dot after tiny dot after tiny dot to the paper, painstakingly shading in the white spaces between all the dozens of veins. It’s easily the hardest method of shading he’s familiar with, and it takes a fucking long time to boot, but the end result always looks amazing, so it’s usually worth it if you know what you’re doing.

That being said, though, stippling takes an enormous amount of concentration. And after today’s journey, Ian doesn’t exactly have a lot of that left over. He’s only about a third of the way through the leaf when he feels himself start slipping, his dots going uneven and sloppy in a way he immediately despises. He also, despite his best efforts, repeatedly finds himself shading some areas way too dark, making him have to push the whole gradient back to fix it. So, finally, with a sigh, he sets his quill back in the inkwell with a clatter. Probably time to be done for the night. He was hoping to start and finish something tonight, but once the muse leaves you, there isn’t much you can do to lure it back.

He holds up the partially-shaded leaf to the light, frowning slightly. He isn’t sure if he likes it fine enough in black and white or if he’d rather add a spot of color. He’s been wanting to test out painting with the dyes they have—maybe try mixing them with some water or something to pull them out of the consistency of brie. They don’t have any brushes around, obviously, and he has no idea how he’d go about making one, so he’ll probably just have to finger-paint it, but whatever. He’ll make do. Sometimes you have to suffer for art.

He stands, his chair creaking as he shoves it back with his hip, and moves over to leave the drawing atop a chest to dry overnight.

“You turnin’ in, Ian?”

Luke’s voice startles him, and Ian hopes his little jump of surprise isn’t visible. “Uh. Yeah,” he says, turning to make eye contact with Luke, who’s now also standing up. The torches on the walls are burning low by now, the room awash in a soft, moody glow. Luke looks almost ethereal in it, the shadows playing on his face in a way that makes Ian’s chest feel funny all over again. He runs his palm over the back of his neck, his fingers dipping down to the first bump of his vertebrae.

“Whatcha thinkin’ about?”

“Hm?”

Luke steps around the side of the table, moving closer to Ian. But, thankfully, he comes to a stop right there by the table’s corner, leaning sideways and resting his fists on it. “You always look so deep in thought, man,” he says softly. “But you’re usually pretty quiet, so I always get curious. What’s going on in that head of yours?”

He smiles tiredly, but even still, there’s a teasing glimmer in his eyes. Ian swallows.

“Nothing—nothing much, I don’t think. I was just…y’know, I dunno. Thinking about nothing.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I dunno. I’m not that interesting, I guess.”

“I think you’re super interesting,” Luke replies without even a beat of hesitation. And—

And _damn_ him.

He is so goddamn earnest. So kind and genuine and _authentic_. He wears his fucking heart on his sleeve, and Ian never knows how he’s supposed to react to that. He almost wishes Luke were an asshole, in a sense. Maybe then it would be easier to ignore his crush on him. Or, even better, maybe he never would’ve even _developed_ this crush in the first place.

“…Thanks,” is all he whispers after a long, long moment. And then, rather jerkily, he turns and drags himself off into the bedroom.

\---

It’s another restless night for Ian. He tosses and turns for the better part of the night, kept up by a million things at once that somehow all manage to evade the finger he tries to put on them. He feels heavy when he wakes up in the morning to the sun streaming into their house, to Luke and Lucah yawning and sliding out of their beds and sidling into the dining room for breakfast. He’s completely impervious to their energy; all he can feel is a metal blanket of tiredness draped over his entire skull. But it’s fine. He’s kind of used to it.

After breakfast, it’s right back at it; once again, they’re off wandering through the swamplands again. But it’s a little bit better, because this time, instead of just blindly searching for something or other, they have an actual, concrete, achievable goal: Gathering as much clay as they can find. And _hoo boy_ , is there a lot of clay to be found.

It turns out that Ian was even righter than he thought when he said before that there’s clay everywhere in this swamp. Because there really is clay _everywhere_ —tiny deposits of it embedded in the lakebed almost everywhere they look. Unfortunately, though, this whole clay-gathering endeavor still comes prepackaged with two huge downsides: One, it involves a lot of splashing around in swamp water, and two, there actually aren’t any _large_ deposits from what Ian has seen. It’s just little bits of soggy clay shoved in between the submerged dirt and stone. Ian was hoping that they’d be able to gather all the clay they needed in a couple of hours, but by the time lunch rolls around, the three of them have only managed to collect a grand total of twenty-six clay balls. In other words, only enough for _two_ emeralds. And, in _other_ other words, less than twenty percent of what they need.

Fan—fucking—tastic.

With Luke and Ian’s joint permission, Lucah bows out shortly after lunch. She promises she’ll instead spend her time down in the mines searching for redstone—“divide and conquer!” as she puts it. Ian knows that’s the most logical thing to do, but part of him suspects that she mainly just wants to get the hell out of the swamps for a while. And he really doesn’t blame her; he’d ask to tag along with her into the mines in a heartbeat if that wouldn’t mean he’d be abandoning Luke in the process.

Ian’s searching eyes locate another deposit of clay. With a grunt, he drives his shovel through the knee-deep water into the lakebed and scoops. The tamped-down ground splits around the blade of the shovel like faults from an earthquake, sending a cloud of loose sediment billowing up. Ian heaves the now-full shovel back out of the water. With a gloved hand, he brushes off the piles of mushy dirt from the shovel head, plucks the lump of slick, gray clay free, and shoves it into his steadily filling bag. And then, he starts the process all over again.

“Ian,” Luke calls, almost seeming to read his mind, “you holdin’ up alright?”

He’s standing thigh-deep in a pond a little ways away, waving an arm to snag Ian’s attention. The water sloshes with his movements, sending nearby lily pads coasting over the tiny waves like riderless surf boards. At least the water is fairly clear, as stagnant and yellow-tinted as it is, Ian thinks to himself as he looks at Luke. This would be a nightmare otherwise.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” Ian shouts back after a moment.

“How much you got now? I just found a _ton_ of clay—probably three balls’ worth!”

“Oh, sweet.” Ian peels open his bag, his eyes flicking through all the clay bits he’s collected since they last took count—easily identifiable by the fact that they’re still wet. “Um, nine balls?”

“Awesome! So with your nine and the three I just got and the four I already had…sixteen. Which makes—”

“Forty-two,” Ian cuts in, hopping a ride on his train of thought. “We’re at four emeralds now.”

Luke wipes the sweat from his brow with his forearm, a steady grin forming on his face. “Hey, we’re making progress, man!”

“We are.”

“Only ten to go!”

“ _Only_.”

“We’re gonna have to stop for the day at some point, but I think at this pace, we’ll definitely finish before the end of tomorrow, especially if Lucah helps us out some more. That’s not too bad!”

“Yeah.”

Luke’s cheer, his upbeatness, his _optimism_ , is utterly foreign to Ian. He knows that even if he forced himself to mimic Luke’s good attitude, it would fall completely flat, so he just doesn’t put up the façade at all. He feels like he’s on a journey to nowhere, honestly. Putting in all this hard work every damn day for what? Nothing at all. He can see the end—his end, _all their_ ends—approaching like a bullet train. And you can’t outrun a speeding train, so why even bother trying? Ian would rather just stand there on the tracks and give himself up to his fate.

He takes a step forward, pushing through the resistance of the still water. There’s more clay half concealed beneath the shadow of a tree a few feet away, he notices. But the moment he turns towards it, he hears an uncomfortably wet slapping sound to the side of him. He spins, his arms cutting through the pond with a wide splash, to find a single, large slime leaping towards him.

Ian has just enough time to pull his sword free from his sheath and to ensure that his bag is still tightly shut before it’s coming down on him. And, heaving his sword upwards to meet it, he slices the slime clean in half with one, fluid swing.

It’s like cutting through soft butter. When Ian pulls back, his blade is soaked and dripping with green goo. The bisected pieces of the slime go tumbling to the ground, where they wriggle and thrash almost in pain, their jelly skin reflecting the sunlight with every wobble. And then, in an instant, both halves bounce back upright and begin advancing on Ian again.

Slimes are weird to say the least. They’re these vaguely cube-shaped things with partially translucent, gelatinous bodies. Twin dark splotches almost like eyes sit suspended within their jelly-like forms. And also, they’re like worms, almost. Because every time you think you’ve killed them, their severed pieces come right back to life as if nothing ever happened. It’s kinda fucking annoying.

Ian goes at the nearer of the two slimes, readying to chop it in two once more, but it hops out of the way of his sword in a surprisingly artful dodge. And then, in the span of an instant, it throws itself full-force against Ian’s chest, knocking him away.

The other annoying thing is that the smaller the slimes get, the faster they become. Although, the direct inverse is true for the damage they can deal, so he’s only briefly stunned before he catches his breath and charges forward again.

“Yo, hey, you need help there?” comes Luke’s voice from afar, twisted with slight urgency.

“Nah. I think I got it,” Ian huffs.

This time, he nails the slime diagonally, splitting it into two more uneven chunks. The bigger of the pieces, no larger than ankle-high, shudders, revives, and bounces toward Ian once more. The other piece wriggles as if it too is trying to resurrect itself. But after a second, it just falls still in a limp pile of jelly, too mashed up to cling to life for longer than an instant.

Ian makes quick work of the remaining slime before turning on the other he hasn’t yet hacked down all the way. He shoves his sword into it but doesn’t quite manage to chop it all the way through before it lunges at him.

Its body slams into him with a much heavier impact than the one before had. Ian doesn’t even have a chance to regain his balance; he stumbles, and suddenly he’s falling, falling, falling. Tumbling backwards into the water with an enormous splash. His hands scrabble at the lakebed, pushing himself up. His head whips around, trying frantically to locate the sword he lost his grip on.

But then, there’s a yell, and Luke comes barreling in out of nowhere. Springing forth, he delivers the slaying blow, cleaving the slime in two. As Ian watches, transfixed by surprise, Luke kills _both_ tiny slimes with one, wide swing of his sword. And then, surrounded by chunks of slime and chartreuse puddles of ooze, he turns to look down at Ian, runs his hand through his short hair, and smiles.

“Wild, man.”

He leans forward, extending a hand in Ian’s direction. Ian stares at him for a moment more before sliding his own hand into Luke’s and letting Luke help him back to a stand. Even after they separate from each other, Ian can feel his heartbeat reverberating in the very center of his palm.

“I _told_ you I had it under control,” he mumbles, pressing his fingertips into his skin. “You shouldn’t have…”

He’s not sure why he’s being snide. He appreciates Luke’s aid, he really does. But something about the way Luke’s looking at him makes him feel… _vulnerable_. Dangerously vulnerable, like an open wound exposed to any airborne bacteria that might come its way. But instead of covering himself with bandages, he covers himself with a brusque sort of flippancy.

It’s not his best character trait, truly.

But Luke, as always, is unphased, unperturbed. “Oh, no, I know. But I wanted to help you out. It seems like you’ve been having a tough time these past couple days to begin with, and now you’re all…”

He gestures abstractly to Ian. Ian doesn’t even have to see himself to know that he probably looks ridiculous. The ends of his hair are dripping onto his shoulders, and his shirt and pants are soaked to his skin. Fantastic. He’s going to be wet for the rest of the goddamn day.

“…Thanks,” Ian says after a long moment, looking at his boots.

“No problem, man, I’ve got your back.” Then, Luke plants one hand on his hip and, with the other, shields his eyes from the mid-afternoon sun as he scans the horizon. “Where’d those dudes come from anyway? I haven’t seen anything out here this whole time.”

“I don’t know. I just heard the squishy noises, and…there they were.”

Slimes are actually kind of uncommon, all things considered. They’re indigenous to swamps, apparently, but Ian and the others usually don’t see too much of them around. A few here and there every couple of days, sure, but that’s nothing compared to the daily onslaught of zombies, creepers, and skeletons they have to deal with.

But, come to think of it, it was a full moon last night. And Ian remembers someone saying at some point that, for whatever reason, slimes tend to show up more when there’s a full moon. Which doesn’t make any sort of sense to him, but okay, whatever. Maybe he’ll ask Lucah to ask McJones for a better explanation if he remembers to when they get home.

With a shake of his head, Luke finally turns back to Ian. “Huh. It’s so flat you’d think you’d see everything coming your way,” he remarks.

“Yeah. I guess I just wasn’t paying attention,” Ian says quietly. He lifts a shoulder halfheartedly. “Sorry. I’m kind of an idiot sometimes.”

He twists away, adjusting his grip on the smooth, wooden handle of his shovel, ready to get back to digging up clay again. But then, all at once, Luke’s hand is on his elbow. Fingers settling around his joint, gripping him firmly, but not nearly enough to hurt. Ian looks up at him sharply, feeling his eyes go round with surprise. The expression on Luke’s face has turned surprisingly— _alarmingly_ —serious.

“Hey. Don’t say that stuff about yourself. You got nothing to apologize for.”

“I—” Ian’s mouth shuts, opens, shuts again, “—I—okay. Okay.”

“No, I mean it. Don’t say that stuff,” Luke repeats, his voice low but somehow still gentle. “It actually, y’know, messes with your brain. When you talk bad about yourself. You internalize it, even if you don’t think you do.”

“Oh. Oh, I…I didn’t know you were a psychology expert. Where’d you learn that?” Ian forces a chuckle, but Luke doesn’t join in.

“Ian.”

Ian’s heart lodges in his throat. “Yeah?”

But Luke doesn’t continue. He just stays silent, his gaze bouncing back and forth between Ian’s eyes. His own eyes are flooded with a frightening intensity, as if he’s meticulously searching Ian’s soul for something Ian can’t even begin to guess.

A soft breeze picks up, rippling the water around Ian’s legs. He and Luke are standing so close. So close. Luke’s hand is still on Ian’s arm, both nerve-wracking and comforting at the same time. And Ian can feel his cheeks ever so slowly growing warm, like a soup just barely starting to simmer. His pulse sounds in his ears, stumbling through a slightly offbeat tempo of wha _-bam,_ wha _-bam,_ wha _-bam_.

Finally, at long last, Luke draws back. Ian holds his breath a little bit, waiting to see if he’s going to say anything else, offer any more insistences that Ian not self-deprecate. But, thankfully, he doesn’t. He just pulls open his bag, extracts a cut of pork, and takes a tender bite of it. Following his lead, Ian grabs something to eat for himself—albeit a small slice of watermelon, not a piece of meat.

“I wish Hammy was here right now,” Luke pipes up after a minute, licking a trickle of meat juice from his lower lip.

Ian chews, swallows, and then says, “Yeah.”

It’s kind of an out-of-the-blue thing to say, but Ian totally gets what he means. Jeff would know what to do; he’s always been their best leader, the one who crafts the smartest and most logical plans and then guides all the others in following them to their fullest extent. With his skills and his aplomb and his knowledge all combined, he’d be able to raise morale at least a little bit, even considering their bleak circumstances. Although, then again, if Jeff were here, their circumstances wouldn’t be nearly as bleak, would they?

But it’s not even specifically Jeff, really. It’s _all_ of them, the four regulars that were stolen from them: Jeff, their fearless leader and master chef and regular spearhead of all their undertakings, no matter how small; Dean, their sense of humor and shining star of charisma, a friend to all he meets and a friend _of_ all who meet _him_ ; Austin, their heart and soul, their one who feels and expresses and loves with everything he has of himself to give; and McJones, their brain, their encyclopedia, their teacher, who’s got a gentle heart of his own that he too allows to be seen sometimes. Poor, poor, sick McJones, who they expect to sense the death of any minute now.

The four of them, their beautiful regulars, _gone_.

What are they going to do without them?

After that, Ian and Luke don’t exchange any more words. There’s no formal end to the conversation, no gesture or glance that indicates it’s high time they get back to it. They just slowly drift apart from each other, resuming their long and tedious task of gathering clay.

\---

It’s maybe an hour later when Ian spots it.

They’ve been having slightly better luck with the clay, finding several fairly lucrative deposits that yield multiple good-sized balls of clay each. The sun is beginning to mosey its way towards sunset, the slowly-changing light giving Ian a vague sense of urgency. They’re nearly up to seven emeralds by now, and Ian thinks himself that almost being half done has never felt worse. He can’t imagine having to wake up tomorrow and do this all over again—won’t _let_ himself imagine it, even, for fear that his tired legs will just give out beneath him and leave him crumpled there in the swamp water until the end of time. But, well, they gotta do what they gotta do, he supposes.

He pauses, right about then, to take another quick snack break. They should be heading back home soon for dinner, so he takes care not to eat too much and spoil his appetite; he’s hoping for leftovers of last night’s soup, truthfully. As he stands there, crunching into a gleaming red apple, he lets his gaze wander across the landscape, jumping across the squat trees draped with vines and the scummy pods marked with the occasional cluster of mushrooms growing nearby.

And right in that instant, his eyes catch on something in the distance.

He leans forward, squinting. It’s clearly a structure of some sort, small and made of dullish brown wood. And if he screws up his face even harder, he thinks he might even be able to make out a couple of supports holding it safely up and out of the water, just like their house.

A house. _Huh_. That’s odd. Why would there be a house—

—Oh.

“Luke!” The word bursts out of him almost the split second the realization hits him. “There’s—there’s a witch hut out there, I think!”

“ _Huh_?”

The sound of splashing, and then Luke comes tripping up behind him. “Where?” he demands, excitement plain in his voice even without Ian turning to look at him.

“Right over there.”

Ian lifts an arm and points far out across the land. He can sense Luke following his finger in quiet concentration, his breath bated.

“… _Ooh_ ,” he whispers after a moment, so suddenly and so adorably that Ian has to suppress a giggle. “You’re _right_ , there it is!”

Ian lets his arm drop back to his side and finally looks over at Luke. Luke, quite predictably, is beaming at him.

“That’s sweet!” he exclaims. “We’re finding _all_ the cool stuff now, man! First the village yesterday, and now a witch hut! What’re the odds?”

He’s got a point. They really _are_ coming across everything all at once, aren’t they? The thought of that makes Ian reflexively grow almost a little suspicious, like he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“Do you think we’d have time to go check it out?” he asks, glancing at the hut once more. He’s kind of terrible with distances, but he’d eyeball it to be a good couple minutes’ walk. And at this stage of the game, mere minutes could mean everything.

But Luke doesn’t even entertain the downsides of the idea for a second. “Oh, we totally do,” he assures Ian with a fast nod. “We can keep looking for clay on the way if you want. It’ll be totally fine.”

Honestly, part of Ian just wants to keep going. To put his head down and keep on truckin’, to get this clay shit over with as soon as humanly possible. But another part of him is just so damn _bored_. And _tired_. And so desperate for a break that he can feel his mind and body _singing_ at the idea of checking out and doing something else for a while. And it’s that particular part of him that wins out in the end.

“Okay. Alright,” he says. And together, they start off towards the hut.

They wade through the swamp water side by side, not quite keeping up conversation but not quite maintaining silence either. They pause every so often to dig up more lumps of clay, but none of the deposits they pass are particularly large, so it’s more of a formality than anything else. As they go, Ian finds his eyes oddly drawn skywards, taking in the vast, cloudless, upside-down wash of blue. …Which then leads to him inevitably tripping over the edge of a pond and half-falling into Luke. And _that_ leads to Luke grabbing at him to steady him and his heart immediately tripping over itself and him then blurting out a half-dozen apologies in a single breath that Luke just chuckles at and shakes his head.

As they grow closer to the witch hut, they start to be able to make out its details. The first thing that Ian notices is the hut itself, although it’s built up on stilts like their own house, is missing something—specifically, a set of stairs leading up to the porch from the lakebed. He and Luke are just going to have to haul themselves up, it seems like. It’s also oddly lacking any sort of front door, the single entrance just a wide-open rectangle in one wall.

The hut itself is fairly small, definitely not enough for more than a single person. It’s squat with a mostly flat roof that hangs over the side of the walls. The porch is narrow, with two teeny tiny railings stuck on either side that seem completely pointless. The shaded square of lake directly beneath the hut is covered with algae and other muck protected from and undisturbed by the elements.

Then, something occurs to Ian. “Wait. Are—are we gonna be walking right into a witch if we go in there?”

They’ve encountered a witch once before; a few weeks back, they spilled out of their house after waking up that morning to find one skulking around just outside. It caught all of them off-guard, and before they could pull themselves together enough to kill it, Austin got nailed with a potion of poison, which left him not only nauseous but also with little shards of glass embedded in his face and arms. And Ian would very much like for that to not happen to him too.

“Oh.” Luke falters slightly, his pace slowing. Ian sees his brows furrow as he lifts a hand to his chin. “You’re probably right. I guess we should have our swords and shields ready, then, huh?”

“Yeah.”

Ian’s not sure exactly how ethical it is to break into someone’s house and attack them when they try to defend themselves from you, but he isn’t going to think too hard about it. Besides, witches are like villagers—not too self-aware or of any human-like consciousness. So it’s fine. Most likely.

As they approach the hut, they draw their swords from their sheaths with unison _shhhf_ s. The stair-less porch is a lot higher than it looked before, standing a few inches above the top of Ian’s head. Beside him, biting his lip, Luke backs up a few steps to get a running start and then makes a jump for it. He doesn’t get very good momentum, seeing as he’s pushing through water, but it’s enough for him to catch himself halfway up and swing his legs onto the porch in a lopsided half-roll.

Ian tries to do the same, but he doesn’t quite get high enough to haul the rest of himself up and onto the porch. Before he just gives up and lets himself drop back down into the water, though, he feels Luke’s hands suddenly on his biceps, giving him that extra pull that he needs. Pushing himself forward, he gets one knee up and, with Luke’s help, is able to struggle to a wobbly stand. He lowers his chin at Luke in a wordless thank-you. And then, their swords clutched tightly in their fists, they inch towards the open doorway into the hut.

But there’s no need for caution at all; the instant they peek inside, they see that the hut is completely deserted. So, lowering their blades, they duck beneath the doorframe and step inside. It’s even smaller than it looked from the outside, somehow. It’s a single room, with a crafting table and an empty cauldron shoved against one wall and a small, neatly-made bed sitting next to another. In one of the open windowsills sits a lumpy clay pot holding a single, wilting, spotted mushroom. But despite the tidy furniture, absolutely everything is covered by a thick layer of dust that says that there hasn’t been an actual witch living here in quite some time.

“Dude, I think the—the witch lady might have moved out. Look at this place,” Ian says, taking a careful step forward. The ceiling is so low that the two of them actually have to hunch a little bit. Ian always forgets how large of a man he is until he goes somewhere that’s too small for him.

“Yeah, seems like it,” Luke agrees, spinning in a slow circle as he looks around.

Impulsively, Ian reaches out and runs a finger through the dust that’s settled on top of the crafting table. His fingertip comes away ghostly-white, and he makes a noise of disgust, rubbing it off on his pants. Although, he’s not sure what exactly he expected to happen.

“…Oh, there’s no chest,” he remarks after a moment, when he realizes. “I was hoping we’d get some, like, cool witch treasure to bring home, but it doesn’t look like it. I mean, we could take the cauldron, I _guess_ , but we already have one of those, I think, so—”

“ _Ian_ ,” Luke says suddenly.

Ian turns towards him. “Wh—”

He follows Luke’s gaze and instantly sees what’s startled him.

“—Oh my god, there’s a cat.”

Sitting right there, hunched right in the very corner of the dusty bed, is a black cat. Ian has no idea how they missed her at first, but there she is, just staring at them. And for a long couple of seconds, none of them move. The cat’s body is rigid, fearful, with hackles raised and ears twisted back and tail held low and stiff. She’s scrawny, Ian notices after a moment, and visibly malnourished too, with poking-out shoulder blades, matted fur, and crust all around her eyelids. And—

And the most beautiful yellow eyes Ian’s ever seen.

“…Luke,” he whispers, being so, so careful not to scare the cat. “Do…do we have any fish?”

“Fish? I…” Out of the corner of his eye, Ian sees Luke slowly opening his bag and peering down into it. “I—I think—oh, yeah, yeah, I have some right here. You want it?”

“Please.”

Neither of them moves their gaze from the cat as Luke reaches out and passes Ian a few pieces of fish. Ian clutches them tightly in one hand and, ever so gingerly, takes a shuffling half-step towards the cat. She instantly flinches, lowering her head sharply as if she’s about to bolt.

“Hey, no, no, no,” Ian murmurs to her in a hushed voice. “Hey, you’re alright. I’m not gonna hurt you.”

With his other hand, he plucks one of the fish pieces from his palm and, inch by inch, holds it out towards her. She immediately stills, and he sees her tiny, black nose twitch rapidly, her whiskers wiggling a little bit.

“Here, eat this.”

And Ian leans forward and places the piece of fish on the edge of the bed before stepping back, giving her space. She remains motionless for another moment before stretching out a bony paw and taking a timid step forward. And then another. And another. When she reaches the fish, she lowers her head and sniffs it again.

And then she devours it.

It’s gone in less time than it takes to blink. The cat stands there, her pink tongue flashing as she licks her chops, and Ian’s heart twists painfully. She must really be starving, the poor thing. Without hesitating, he puts another piece down in front of her. And then, just as she starts to snap that one up too, he thinks better of it and dumps his entire handful of fish in front of her for her to go to town on.

And go to town she does. She buries her face in the fish and just eats—eats what Ian would guess is probably the first real meal she’s had in a long time. Ian and Luke just watch her quietly, completely unmoving for fear that they’ll disturb her. And slowly, as she works her way through the food, Ian starts to notice a shift in her body language. Her hackles lower, her fur un-puffs itself. And slowly, so slowly, her tail begins to rise into the air, swishing back and forth, back and forth.

The cat polishes off the entire pile of fish cutlets. When she’s done, she lowers herself into an elegant sit and yawns almost contentedly. Then, to Ian’s surprise, she gives a soft chirp, blinking her gorgeous yellow eyes up at him. Delicately, Ian stretches out a single finger towards her. And, after a moment, she pads forward across the bed and rubs the side of her face along his knuckle.

Ian would be lying if he said he didn’t tear up a little. Or a lot. The cat mewls again, and he slides his fingers forward and gently begins to scritch the top of her hand. And she allows it, pressing up into his hand and breaking into a low, rumbling purr that makes Ian’s heart squeeze again. Her fur is soft, even as dirty and tangled as it is, and her meow is so happy and high-pitched and bell-like, and oh, Ian is absolutely, completely in love.

“…Look at that,” Luke says finally, his voice soft with something that almost sounds like awe, and Ian can feel his eyes on him and the cat. “She loves you, man.”

“Y-yeah,” Ian mumbles, only half-listening. The cat is licking his finger now, her tongue rough and scratchy against his skin in the best way. There is no fucking way he is leaving this witch hut without her.

“It’s lucky we found her. This place has clearly been abandoned for a while now. And—and I bet she can’t even really escape ‘cause there’s so much water all around here. She’s probably too afraid to jump in.”

“I hate how thin she is,” Ian breathes, a lump forming in his throat. He kneels, getting down on eye-level with the cat, and, still purring, she headbutts his nose. “It’s okay,” he tells her, rubbing a finger under her chin, “we’re gonna take good care of you. We’re gonna take you somewhere nice and warm and dry, and you can eat as much as you want there. Okay? Does that sound good?”

The cat trills, and that’s a good enough answer for Ian. He straightens up and, with the utmost care, reaches around her, slides his arms under her belly, and lifts her up off the bed and into his arms. He expects her to tense up, but she doesn’t at all; she just nuzzles into him as he cradles her to his chest.

“Hi baby,” he murmurs.

She’s got polydactyly, he notices for the first time as she starts to knead at his shoulder. Her two front paws are wide, mitten-like, crammed with a couple of extra toes each. He thinks they’re the cutest things he’s ever seen.

And then, when he finally turns, he finds Luke staring at him. There’s this odd, melting sort of look in Luke’s eyes that makes Ian feel a little bit like he’s melting as well.

“Didn’t expect we’d be adopting a cat today,” Luke says after a second, giving a quiet, velvety chuckle.

“I—I can’t just abandon her, dude.”

“No, no, of course not, we gotta bring her home. She’s so attached to you already. It—it’s really sweet.”

He steps forward towards Ian. The floorboards creak under his weight, and instantly, the cat’s head whips around, her claws digging into Ian. “Hey, now. It’s just Luke,” Ian chides her gently, holding her a little tighter. “He’s alright.”

“What? Just _alright?_ ” Luke repeats with a quirk of his eyebrow, and Ian’s heart shivers.

“O-oh, no, I—” he stammers.

But Luke laughs again. “I’m just teasin’ you, Ian.”

He moves in even a little closer, and just like Ian did before, he offers a finger to the cat to inspect. She eyes it a little bit reproachfully but sniffs him anyway, and once she’s familiarized herself with his scent, she offers him his own friendly cheek-rub of acceptance.

Luke begins to scratch the spot between her ears, and a happy purr bursts out of her once again. “She’s sweet,” Luke says, looking at Ian with a tender smile that crinkles the corners of his eyes. “She’s like your little baby.”

Ian glances down. “Y-yeah.”

His face is starting to heat up, he can feel. They’re so close, so unnervingly close. Luke’s standing sort of to the side of Ian, his shoulder bumping lightly against Ian’s every so often as he pets the cat’s head. His eyes are halfway lowered and his mouth is parted a sliver, and Ian can hear the sound of his breathing, calm and slow and barely audible.

He’s so cute. So cute it hurts Ian’s chest to look at him. Just like the cat cuddled in Ian’s arms, but in a slightly different way. And Ian thinks to himself, wildly, that this here must be what heaven is like—just _being_ there, wherever you are, your mind freed of all concerns, holding a loving kitty and standing comfortably beside a beautiful man.

“She—she can be _our_ baby,” Ian blurts suddenly without thinking. It spills out of him almost of its own accord, and Luke stills for a heartbeat.

“…Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Ian licks his lips. Oh god, what the hell is he saying? But it’s too late to back out now. “Sh—she clearly likes you too. So we can, I dunno, be her—her dads. If you want. I guess. I dunno.”

He sounds kind of hollow, kind of strained and faux-casual. He feels his cheeks burn even hotter, his heartbeat pulsing in his windpipe, and he quickly buries his face in the top of the cat’s head to hide how red he is. For a moment, Luke doesn’t respond, and each and every millisecond of silence slams into Ian like a freshly-sharpened dagger. But then, without any warning or buildup, Luke remarks, “Okay, cool, I like that. I’m ready for fatherhood, I think.”

And he says it like it’s nothing. Like it’s just a funny joke between friends. Which it _is_ , to him. Why would he have any reason to suspect that Ian’s been harboring less-than-platonic feelings for him? Ian’s been _very_ careful to keep his true emotions locked away deep inside of him.

Aside, of course, from times like this, when he says something dumb and impulsive that comes from a place a little too close to home.

Luckily for him, though, Luke doesn’t seem to think anything of it. When Ian finally lifts his head again—after giving the cat a few more kisses on her tiny, fluffy head to buy time for his flush to fade away—Luke’s smiling faintly at him. And despite everything, he finds himself smiling back a little.

“…What if we’re wrong?” he says, his words coming out curled from his grin. “What if—what if the witch actually _does_ come back all of a sudden and, like, hexes us for stealing her cat?”

Luke snickers. “No, I don’t think we gotta worry about that, dude. And anyway, if this witch lady likes her cat so much, maybe she should actually take care of it!”

“Wow. Burn,” Ian throws back with a giggle of his own. The cat chirps nosily into his chest, perhaps offering a personal complaint about her owner who seems to have so cruelly abandoned her. Luke snakes a hand out across Ian and runs his palm along the entire length of her back, from her head to the base of her tail, which elicits another loud meow.

“What are you gonna name her?” Luke asks he strokes the scruff of her neck.

“Wh—I—”

And Ian’s a little bit embarrassed to realize that the fact of having to give her a name never even occurred to him until just now. “—I—I mean, we should name her together, right?” he suggests haltingly. “‘Cause we’re her dads. Y’know.”

Luke laughs, and Ian somehow _feels_ the vibration of Luke’s voice in his ribcage. “Alright, yeah, I get you. We gotta fill out the birth certificate, huh? I’m bad at coming up with names, but—”

“Oh, no, I’m not—I’m not good at names either. But maybe with the two of us, uh—”

Ian still feels a little bit like he can’t talk properly. Like his tongue is half-paralyzed and his teeth have turned to rubber. He has the words he wants to say, but for some reason, he just can’t fit them out of his mouth properly. …Well, that’s a lie; he _knows_ the reason why he’s tongue-tied. But still.

Then, the cat finally begins to wriggle in Ian’s arms, twisting herself restlessly back and forth and flicking her tail against Ian’s arm like a whip. He’s honestly surprised it took her this long to run out of patience, considering the typical capriciousness of cats. Not wanting to call her bluff and end up with a nasty scratch, he immediately bends and gently sets her down on her feet, giving her one, final, pat on the head. But even having regained her freedom, she remains by his side, weaving between his legs and around his ankles, still purring faintly and nosing at him.

“…Well, maybe we should name her something to do with witches,” Luke ventures at last, watching the cat rub her side against Ian’s boot.

“Glinda?” Ian offers and then immediately makes a face. “No, I don’t like that.”

“Aw, you don’t like _Glinda?_ I’d be down with that. I like that movie.”

“Yeah, but it’s too…too _happy_. We should give her a spookier name, I feel like. I mean, she’s a black cat in a witch’s hut; we gotta go full stereotype here.”

“True that, true that.” Luke rubs his chin, frowning. But after just a few seconds, his eyes light up. “ _Oh!_ What about _Hex?_ ‘Cause you said the witch might come back and put a hex on us for stealing her cat. That’s pretty spooky, I feel like!”

“Hex,” Ian repeats. “Hex _ie_. Y’know, I actually really like that.”

“Yeah? _Hexie_ it is, then!” Luke announces triumphantly.

And the cat—little Hexie—immediately trills by Ian’s feet as if to say, _Yes, that’s me._

\---

Ian already knew the moment he laid eyes on Hexie that he was going to be bringing her home with him, but now that he and Luke have declared themselves her legal parents and given her an adorable name, there’s _really_ no way they’re leaving her behind. They spend a few minutes brainstorming how to get her home safe and dry, and they eventually decide that the best option available to them is to carry her in one of their bags.

So, Ian painstakingly empties out most of his bag into Luke’s—all of the clay he’s gathered and the food he brought along with him and such—and then he lifts Hexie up and places her snugly into the bag. She’s just big enough for her eyes to poke out over the edge, and she stares up at Ian with these wide, alarmed pupils that almost make him laugh. He feeds her a few more pieces of meat while she’s sitting there to try and get her to relax a little. And then, once it seems like she’s calm enough to not just leap out of the bag the moment Ian takes a step, they start back towards home.

The hardest part is getting out the witch hut itself; Ian obviously can’t just jump back into the water with Hexie in tow. But they manage it with some maneuver that involves Luke hopping down first, Ian letting his legs hang down, and then Luke reaching up and helping him drop down gently. Except what Luke decides to do is grab Ian around the waist like he’s a newlywed bride, holding him tightly as he breaks the fall of Ian’s jump. And even long after he’s let go of Ian, Ian can still feel the press of his hands as clear as day, as if they’ve left branding marks scorched deep into his skin. But that’s—it’s whatever, really. He tries not to think about it.

It’s smooth sailing from there on out. For once, Ian’s grateful for all the flat swampland because it means they don’t have any more obstacles to navigate with Hexie. Ian _is_ kind of afraid of what they’ll do if they run into any more slimes, but fortunately, that never happens. It’s just them walking for a good long while, chatting amicably between themselves. And all the while, Hexie sits there in his bag, her little kitty face poking out, purring up an absolute storm.

When they arrive back at home, they file inside and slip off their soaked shoes. “Welcome to your new home,” Ian whispers to Hexie as he lowers his bag to the ground, but he gets an abrupt rush of embarrassment when he notices Luke smiling over at him, and he pulls nervously at a loose piece of his hair. Lucah, for the nonce, doesn’t seem to be around, which is pretty uncharacteristic for her. Maybe she’s still down in the mines, Ian thinks.

“Hey, we’re back!” Luke calls, cupping his hands around his mouth.

“ _Hi!_ ” comes a muffled shout in response. And then, a couple seconds later, Lucah comes rushing out of the back bedroom. “Hi, hello, sorry!” she says brightly, her fruity orange hair tumbling down across both shoulders. “I was just changing. How’d that go? How much clay did you—”

And Ian sees it on her face the instant she notices Hexie.

“—Oh my goodness!” she gasps, her hands rising to her cheeks, taking a few half-steps forward. “Who are _you_ , my angel _?_ ”

“This is Hexie. We found an abandoned witch’s hut, and she was just in there all alone. There was clearly no one around to take care of her anymore, so we just…”

Lucah sinks into a squat. “Hello, little one,” she coos, running her fingertips along Hexie’s furry head. “How are you?”

“She’s not in the greatest shape, actually,” Ian answers, bending down and holding open the edges of his back to allow Hexie to jump out. She immediately scampers up to Lucah, headbutting her knee and sniffing her outstretched hand. “She’s super skinny and malnourished, and she’s pretty dirty too.”

“Oh, poor baby,” Lucah murmurs, her forehead wrinkling. “Well, that’s alright, we’ve got plenty of food for you, honey. And I was thinking about getting cleaned up today anyways; I’ll just bring up extra water for her, too, if you want to give her a bath.”

“Yeah, I…yeah. That’d be great, thank you.”

Then, with a high-pitched mewl, Hexie goes wandering off under the table, curious to explore all of the new stimuli she’s been exposed to all at once. The three of them watch her dart around the room for a minute before Lucah lets out a breathy laugh and shakes her head.

“Well, my day just got ten fucking times better,” she sighs.

“Glad we could help!” Luke says. “But—wait, are you saying that you didn’t have good luck finding redstone, then?”

“No, no, I found a ton, don’t worry! We’re definitely all good to go ahead and make the compass now. And plus, now I can help you guys with the clay again, so you won’t be all alone.”

“Awesome! That’s one thing taken care of, at least.”

“How ‘bout you guys? I know there’s no way you’re done with the clay, but how’d you do?”

“We ended up with exactly eighty-one, I think. Is that right, Ian?”

Ian doesn’t know why Luke’s asking _him_ to confirm; it’s not like he knows what the hell’s going on around here. But all the same, he nods his agreement.

Lucah clasps her hands together by her waist. “Okay! Okay, that’s better than I expected! We’re over halfway there!” And then, she breaks off to scoff at herself. “Well, I mean, I should say _you’re_ over halfway there. I really didn’t do shit, did I?” She laughs.

“Nah, you helped a ton, Lucah!” Luke cuts in with a shake of his head. “We’re really grateful for you.”

“Well, if you say so, thank you.”

Across the room, Hexie goes from the floor up to a chair and onto the dining table in two graceful leaps. She stands there, staring off into space, the very tip of her tail flopping to and fro, her ears perked up and alert.

Suddenly, Lucah snaps her fingers. “Oh, y’know what?” she starts, raising a finger and her eyebrows. “They say cats are good for sick people, don’t they? I dunno the exact science behind it, but somehow petting a cat makes people heal faster, I’ve heard. So maybe you guys’ll let her visit with McJones for a while!”

“Oh, yeah, sure. Of course,” Ian says.

“Yeah,” Luke adds, “it’s not like she’s just _our_ cat, she’s the family’s. He’s more than welcome to have her.”

“Okay, awesome. Actually, speaking of McJones, I think he’s awake right now; I should go check on him.”

Lucah turns on her heel and strides off towards McJones’s quarantined sick room. Ian watches her as she lifts her fist and raps on the wood twice in sharp succession. There comes an inaudible mumble from within, and she gently eases open the door and slips inside, shutting it again behind her with a soft _click_.

Then, Ian reaches down, grabs the strap of his bag, and swings it up onto the table. Hexie immediately trots over to give it a good sniff, as if she didn’t just ride in it for the entire multiple-hour walk home.

“We should probably put the clay somewhere safe so we don’t lose it,” Ian says as he begins to unpack his shit.

Luke drops his bag onto the table as well, standing a few feet away from Ian. “Yeah, yeah, good point. I’ll do that right now.” He reaches into his bag and scoops out an armful of lumpy clay balls, setting them down all at once in front of him. One of them starts to roll away, but Ian snaps out a hand and snags it before it can tumble off the edge. “Woah, nice catch,” Luke remarks with a tilt of his head.

“Thanks.”

Ian twists away, moving over to their food chest to tuck away the meat and fruit he has left over from today. Their food chest is already full to bursting as it is, and he struggles to find places for everything to fit inside neatly. That’s one thing they don’t have to worry about, at least; Jeff and Dean got an excellent animal farm going before they kicked it. But even if every single one of their animals dropped dead tomorrow from the same plague that McJones has contracted, they’d still be set for a good two to three _weeks_ with the surplus they’ve got going on.

“Hey, Ian, do you think you could put away my food too while you’re at it?” Luke pipes up.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Awesome, thanks so much, man.”

When Ian rises and returns to the table, he finds that Luke has already emptied his bag of foodstuffs; sitting next to the piles of clay balls are some strips of pork, a few slices of watermelon, and a couple of pieces of fish. Ian automatically reaches for one of the fish pieces, but then he stops halfway there.

“Okay, right,” he says slowly. “We—we should probably save these for Hexie, do you think? Or at least a few of them, if everyone’s okay with that.”

“Oh, definitely. None of us here have touched any of the fish at all, I don’t think. I’ve been carrying ‘em around for a while now, but I haven’t actually eaten a single one of them this whole time. And before that, they were just sitting forgotten in the chest, so…” He shrugs. “Makes sense to just toss ‘em all to Hexie, I guess.”

Ian nods. “Maybe we should make a chest specifically for her so we can keep track of what’s going to her. ‘Cause I’m just now realizing that she’s gonna need other stuff too. Like a bowl for her food and water. And a litter box. And a collar, maybe.”

“What about a bed?” Luke puts in.

“Well, I mean, she can just sleep on my bed with me as long as she doesn’t, like, start yelling in the middle of the night.”

As if on cue, Hexie gives a loud meow. Ian shoots a look at her, trying to tell her with his eyes that such behavior, as endearing as it is right now, will absolutely not be tolerated at three AM.

Luke gazes at him, resting his fists on the tabletop. “Well, alright, if that’s what you wanna do. We got so many sheep out there, it’d be no problem to go grab some wool and maybe get McJones to sew it up into a cushion or something for her. But it’s up to you.

“And I dunno about the collar thing, honestly—like, how would we even make that?—but for her food and stuff I’m sure we can just use one of our bowls. We have a couple of extras, I think.”

“Do we?” Ian asks.

“I’m pretty sure. I mean, we definitely do since, y’know, everyone else isn’t…here. Anymore.” Luke’s eyes dip away. “But—but even before Dean & Jeff’s accident, I think we had more than enough bowls. I might be wrong, so don’t quote me on that, but I’m pretty sure you’re good to go.”

“Alright, sweet.”

Ian thinks for a moment, scanning the row of chests, trying to recall which one they keep their wooden dishware in. Behind him, he hears Luke go back to taking the clay out of his bag, counting each ball to himself under his breath. Eventually, Ian remembers seeing Lucah fetch the bowls from the tools chest when she poured them their soup last night. And when he flips open the lid, sure enough, there they are nested inside each other in a small tower, standing on top of a couple of half-used stone swords and pickaxes. He kind of disagrees with the idea of bowls being in the same group as picks; they’re both tools in a broad definition, _yeah_ , but that’s just…stupid, honestly. But Luke’s the one who sorts everything around here, and Ian isn’t about to criticize him to his face.

He grabs the topmost bowl from the tower and slams the chest shut again. Then, he sets it down on the table right in front of Hexie, who’s busied herself in licking her paw. 

“Here, I bet you’re thirsty too,” he says to her. And he uncorks his water bottle and pours about half of it into the bowl. Almost as soon as he withdraws the bottle, just as he expected, Hexie comes running, skidding up to the bowl and eagerly beginning to lap up the water. Ian sees her tongue flicking rapidly as she drinks, and he feels a small smile tug at his mouth. They’re so lucky they found her.

“Ian, I love you, man.”

Luke’s voice comes suddenly, completely out of nowhere. And Ian feels his heart stop dead.

“Wh—”

“You’re so flippin’ good with her. With Hexie.” Luke’s watching him from the other side of the table, that strange, soft expression from before crossing his face and flooding through his eyes again. “You’re—you’re like a cat-whisperer or something.”

“I—”

Luke runs his hand over the top of his head, puffing out his cheeks. “Man. I’m continually just, like, absolutely blown away by you. You’re so talented at so many things. I wish I was half as cool as you are. And I mean that seriously.”

He’s looking at Ian with such _fondness_. So much fondness that he’s visibly welling over with it. And Ian has no idea what he’s supposed to do with that. His mouth is hanging open, but not even the tiniest peep escapes him. He feels completely rooted to the ground. As if he couldn’t make his limbs or his lungs or his jaw work even if he had the wherewithal to try. His heart is pounding triple-time, and he feels sweaty and covered in goosebumps both at the same time. He’s just frozen, looking at Luke. Looking at Luke, who’s looking right back at him. Both of them, somehow gazing into each other’s eyes.

Ian’s going to pass out.

Finally, maybe when it becomes clear to him that he’s not gonna get a response from Ian, Luke turns away, sliding his fingers through his hair again. Ian’s whole entire body feels like it’s stuffed full of live wires like some kind of demented teddy bear. But he manages to force himself to tear his glance from Luke and back down to Hexie, who seems to have had her fill of water based on the way she’s gone back to bathing herself. In the thick silence that’s settled over them, Ian can make out the sound of Lucah’s voice from inside McJones’s room. That’s a good sign; it means that McJones isn’t comatose and really is awake like Lucah told them. And then, just as that thought crosses Ian mind—

“There’s a _cat?!_ ” McJones shouts from within his room, sounding about ten times more alive than Ian’s heard him in weeks.

Luke immediately bursts out laughing, throwing a bright glance at Ian, and Ian returns his amused smirk. And just like that, the moment that had passed between them is forgotten.

Well, _almost_ forgotten. But anyways.

A few minutes later, Lucah emerges from McJones’s bedroom and relays a message from him, which is that he—unsurprisingly—is very, _very_ excited that they brought home a kitty and that he’d love to meet her later. Then, Lucah, Luke, and Ian all tromp down into their mines and bring up a couple of buckets of freshwater from an underground pool to give Hexie a bath. She’s surprisingly docile through the entire twenty minutes it takes them to clean her off, probably because she’s glad to finally wash away all the dirt and grime that’s built up on her for god knows how long.

After that, Luke puts some steak in the furnace to cook for dinner, Lucah grabs a quick bath of her own, and then the three of them plus Hexie sit down and chat for a while. Just a few minutes into their conversation, though, McJones surprises them all by actually getting out of bed and shuffling himself into the dining room to hang with them all together for the first time in weeks. He says something or other about how he was getting lonely in there and Lucah’s cooking just smelled too good to stay away, but it’s glaringly obvious that he was really just lured by the presence of Hexie.

“You’re like Grandpa Joe from that chocolate factory movie!” Lucah says, and McJones almost coughs up a lung from laughing so hard.

He looks, actually, better than Ian expected, considering how Lucah’s been describing his condition. He’s quite visibly sallow and weak and just generally infirm, wrapped up in one of his thick woolen blankets like a human burrito. But Ian can also tell just by looking at him that there’s still some kick left in him. A little bit of fight, enough to stave off death itself for at least a little while longer. It’s kind of impressive, actually; he’s laughing and chatting and smiling right along with the rest of them as he watches Hexie pad around on the table in front of them. Apparently cats _are_ good for sick people.

Or maybe McJones is just a badass. _All_ the regulars are badasses, honestly. The four of them are hard acts to follow to say the least.

Talk turns to Hexie for a while—the real star of this world, in Ian’s opinion. Luke mentions how he and Ian are Hexie’s two dads—“Very progressive!” is what Lucah has to say to that—and Ian chuckles and pretends like there’s not some part of his heart that twinges every time he thinks about it. Lucah and McJones are then dubbed Hexie’s godmother and godfather, respectively, and they both seem equally ridiculously pleased about it. And Hexie warms up to McJones just as quickly as she did the other three, putting up only a minute or two of skittishness before he has her rubbing on the rims of his glasses and licking his hands.

They eat a nice family dinner, the five of them—Ian, Luke, Lucah, and McJones with their steak and Hexie with more fish that she devours in an instant. And when they’re all done and the plates have been cleared, Ian pulls back out the parchment and ink and goes to work sketching out a portrait of Hexie, his leaf drawing from yesterday all but forgotten. Lucah and Luke watch him work, throwing out encouragement after encouragement, their voices hushed with genuine awe that boggles Ian but at the same time he sincerely appreciates—although it’s _Luke’s_ compliments that really make his legs feel like jelly. McJones, on the other hand, bids them a very early _g’night_ and just heads off to crash in his bed again, his measly energy reserve already used up. Ian has to say, he’s secretly a little bit glad about that, only because it means he doesn’t have to worry about being obligated to offer up Hexie to him for the night. He really is sorry McJones is so sick, and he really does hope—although, he’s not sure if he actually _believes_ —that Hexie will be able to help him get better, but he just kinda wants to be the one to spend her first night with her.

Once the moon has firmly settled itself overhead and the growls and creaks of monsters outside have begun to float in like a steady white noise, the three of them decide to turn in as well. Together, they change into their nightclothes and blow out all the torches and slide into bed. And Hexie, following them, immediately hops up onto Ian’s bed and clambers across his legs as if she’s already done this a thousand times over. She curls into the crook of Ian’s arm and almost instantly falls asleep, breathing tiny kitty snores mixed with purring into his ear. And Ian thinks he might actually cry a little bit.

But even as Luke and Lucah too drift off to sleep around him, he himself remains awake—sleepless again, as usual. He honestly can’t remember the last time he was able to just close his eyes and pass out like everyone else. It’s not that he isn’t tired; on the contrary, all his muscles are limp with utter exhaustion, and his eyelids feel like lead, burning to just be closed for a while. But it doesn’t matter how tightly he shuts he eyes and how still he lays beneath his blankets. Sleep will always stay just beyond his reach until it and it _alone_ decides to relent and show mercy on him.

And the worst part of it all isn’t the cloud of tiredness that hangs over him at nearly all hours of the day, his body constantly running on less than a full tank. That really does fucking suck, but it’s not the worst thing. No, the thing Ian hates the most about having insomnia is that it gives his brain time to think completely undisturbed. Or maybe it’s the other way ‘round—he can’t sleep _because_ his mind is racing. It doesn’t really matter whether the chicken or the egg came first, though; the end result is still the same—his brain has all the opportunity in the world to do whatever the hell it wants. And what Ian’s learned about his brain is that, whenever it has time to itself, it likes to fixate on all the things he sincerely wishes it wouldn’t.

Like Luke.

Like the fact that Luke is sleeping just two beds away from him, Jeff’s empty mattress standing as the only buffer between them. Like the fact that if he concentrates enough, he can parse out the specific sound of Luke’s breathing from everyone else’s. Like the fact that he knows that if he rolled over, he’d be able to look right into Luke’s sleeping face, eyes fluttered shut and lips parted slightly. Like the fact that Luke is absolutely fucking disgustingly beautiful. Like the fact that Luke’s voice is like the sweetest, most delicious honey, making Ian just melt into a puddle whenever he catches so much as a hint of it. Like the fact that Luke paid so much attention to him tonight. Like the fact that Luke kept looking at him and smiling at him and nudging him. Like the fact that Ian kept praising his art over and over and over again.

Like the fact that Ian desperately wants to kiss him. And like the fact that he wants Luke to kiss him back equally as much.

Like the fact that just he wants Luke to hold him in his arms. Like the fact that he wants to bury his face in Luke’s shoulder and feel Luke rubbing his back and pressing little smooches to the crown of his head. Like the fact that whenever he looks at Luke, his whole chest burns with the most painful, wanting _ache_ he’s ever felt in his goddamn life. Like the fact that Ian has never, ever been this head-over-heels in love for a guy, _ever_. Like the fact that that scares him so fucking much. Like the fact that he knows he’s going to have his heart smashed into a thousand tiny pieces, absolutely pulverized on the floor, because there is no fucking way in hell that Luke likes him back. Like the fact that he’s done this to himself, really. Like the fact that it’s his own stupid idiot fault that he went and fell for an absolutely unattainable guy.

Like the fact that he is in love with Luke, and he doesn’t know what the hell to do about it. And like the fact that he can’t stop thinking, no matter how hard he tries, about what Luke said to him earlier:

 _Ian, I love you, man_.

His heart pulses with the echo of it. He can almost hear it as if Luke is saying it all over again, whispering right into the shell of his ear.

_I._

_Love._

_You._

It doesn’t actually mean anything, and he knows that. There wasn’t anything even _remotely_ romantic about the context. Plus, people say _I love you_ to their friends all the time. He’d have to be the biggest idiot in the world to think that’s indicative of anything significant.

And yet, the biggest idiot in the world he must be, because every time he remembers those words, remembers the sweet, warm look on Luke’s face as he says them, his whole body fills to the brim with butterflies.

But at the same time, some part of him absolutely despises it. Because it hurts so fucking much when someone cares about you and says that they think you’re cool and that they like the things that you do, but you just _know_ that they don’t mean it in quite the way you wish they did. It’s so bittersweet in the rottenest way.

Because it’s not like Ian’s _unhappy_ , per se, with how he and Luke are right now. They have a great dynamic, a natural sort of give-and-take that Ian really, really appreciates being able to have, especially right now. It’s just that—well, he’s in possession of this amazing friendship, and he wants to preserve it so badly while at the same time still craving even more on top of that. But in the process of reaching for more, you’ll almost always lose your grip on what you already have. And the sensation of the butterflies in his chest mixed with that gut-churning-ness of knowing he’s caught between the rock of regret and the hard place of rejection then mixed too with his bone-tired restlessness makes Ian feel like he’s about to fucking puke.

He shifts slightly, feeling a weight against his chest—maybe Hexie, but maybe just the world—and half-buries his face into his pillow. And he prays that sleep will come and take him away from his thoughts before he drives himself insane.

\---

The next day, it’s right back to the grind. They share a quick breakfast that consists largely of Luke and Lucah planning out the day’s work together while Ian stares blearily into his apple slices. His head is throbbing a little bit, his vision swimming in and out of focus, and all he wants to do is just crawl back into bed and pull the covers over his heavy eyes. But he knows from plenty of experience that this level of tiredness is only temporary; he should feel alright enough by the time lunchtime hits.

After breakfast, Lucah scoops up Hexie and carries her into the sick room so she can spend some time with McJones while the rest of them are out gathering clay all day. She comes back with a pleased smile and relays to Luke and Ian, “His face just lit up when I put her in his arms. It was nice. If nothing else, we know we’re making him a little more comfortable so he’s not just sitting in that dark room all alone every day.”

Ian briefly wonders if cat-focused palliative care is something that already exists or if they can file a patent for this. Then, the three of them shove on their still-damp boots, sling their shovels over their shoulders, and head out.

Ian didn’t quite realize it at the time, but he and Luke made pretty good work of all the clay deposits surrounding their house. The lakebeds they pass as they pick their way across the land are dotted with holes and pits like some kind of warzone. But the unfortunate side to that is that they have to walk a pretty decent ways away before they come across untouched clay deposits and can get to scooping again.

With Lucah having rejoined them, it’s pretty likely that they’re gonna get enough clay balls by the end of today—or, at the very least, get damn close to that—especially ‘cause they’re not going to be stopping for a good forty-five minutes to go check out a witch hut and collect a cat. Ian would be lying if he said he wasn’t glad about that, just because spending ten hours a day digging in the dirt sucks major dick. But he’s grown weary once more, the high from adopting Hexie yesterday having almost worn off. It’s setting in all over again how much of a pointless exercise this is, how they’ve been doomed ever since their last surviving regular got put out of commission in the span of a few hours. Ian’s fatigue increases tenfold whenever he even _thinks_ about what it’s going to be like prepping for the journey to the mansion, not to mention the journey itself and the final showdown waiting for them at the end. They’re barely keeping everything under control as it is, and they haven’t even actually _done_ anything.

By midday, they’re up to a hundred seven clay balls. Lucah does a little bit of a whoop at the flat hundred mark, throwing her fist into the air triumphantly. “We’ve made it so far!” she cries. “Just a little further to go! We got this, guys!”

Lucah’s been in the best mood out of all of them, Ian thinks. Not just today, but ever since McJones’s sickness began. It’s not that Luke’s in a particularly bad mood either, but he’s just…quieter. More cautious. Lucah, though—she’s the exuberant one, the one who’s always upbeat and optimistic no matter what the situation. It’s easy to see why she and Dean are such close friends, considering. And even now, she’s humming pleasantly to herself as they work, sometimes even opening her mouth and actually breaking into lyrics.

Ian himself also likes to sing, but he’s way too self-conscious to even consider karaoke-ing it around other people. So he just stays quiet and enjoys the melodious tones of Lucah’s voice as pleasant background noise. He’s currently hacking away at a pretty large clay deposit at the edge of a small pond beneath a tree—the biggest deposit he’s seen yet, actually. Almost the entire lakebed consists of a thick layer of clay, and he’s been working his way through it for at least ten full minutes now. Screwing up his face, he sticks the head of his shovel into another part of clay and stamps it down with his heel. He then scoops it out with a grunt, holds it in the air for a second to allow the water to run off the sides of the shovel, and finally dumps it into his ever-expanding bag. He’s gotten pretty good at judging the amount of clay he’s been collecting just by sight, and he would say that one shovelful alone was easily a solid two balls.

They’re getting this done way faster than he expected. They might even finish up before the sun starts to set, which is kinda surprising to Ian. This time yesterday, he was convinced that they were going to be out digging up clay for five or six days _minimum_ , and now it looks like it’s going to be fewer than two. No matter what, though, they’re not going to be done early enough to make the trek back to the village today—not unless they wanna camp out overnight—and plus, Ian doesn’t think Lucah’s even made the compass they need yet. So while getting done gathering clay is a pretty big milestone, it’s not the end of their preparations by any means.

Around then, a strong breeze starts to kick up in the air. After a few minutes of Ian’s hair being whipped about across his face and eyes, he jams his shovel into the ground sticking straight up and reaches around into his bag for a hair tie. He finds one loose in the very bottom of the bag, hidden beneath an apple and half-caked in clay. He flicks the bits of clay off with his fingers before yanking his hair back into a messy bun at the base of his head.

Truthfully, he welcomes the wind, though. It’s usually pretty mild around here, but today’s very uncharacteristically warm, and he’s been baking in his chestplate all morning. He’s actually been considering just taking it off altogether, throwing it aside for a while. There’s not much around here except for the slimes that they’ll hear coming and maybe a few creepers who won’t be able to get very close without _one_ of the three of them noticing anyway.

…Come to think of it, creepers are afraid of cats, aren’t they? Or, if not _afraid_ , then _something_ , because he knows they tend to stay away when there’re kitties around. Maybe they kinda fucked up letting Hexie stay home with McJones. Ian’ll have to bring that point up later, when they’re back home.

The wind gusts up again, whistling through the trees and the vines hanging down from their canopies. A leaf tumbles down and smacks Ian lightly in the face, surprising him and making him jolt. Giving a slight shake of his head that makes his bun flop against his neck, he itches his nose where the leaf landed on him and looks back down at his work. He’s cleared out this particular pond, it looks like. He stands there for a moment, inspecting the lakebed for a few moments. And once he’s satisfied with the job he’s done, he steps up out of the pond and onto the bank, in search of somewhere new to dig.

“Hey, does anyone have something to eat? I’m outta pork.”

Luke’s voice cuts through the blustery air. Ian turns towards where he’s standing knee-deep in a pond of his own, a couple lily pads bobbing around him. When he notices Ian watching him, he lifts a hand in a wave.

“I forgot to replenish my food after yesterday,” he says, looking somewhat sheepish, “so now I’m basically out. Can either of you guys spot me anything?”

“Oh, yeah, sure. No problem.”

Ian makes his way over to Luke, hopping over a few pond-scummy puddles and winding around a tree or two. When he reaches Luke, he asks, “What do you need?”

“Ah, nothing in particular. Just…y’know. Meat or something, if you can spare it.”

Ian nods, pulling open his bag and shoving his clay to the side to see what he’s got. There’s a couple of pieces of beef down at the bottom he hasn’t gotten around to eating yet, and so he pulls them out and passes them to Luke. Luke immediately takes a big bite of one of them, smiling gratefully as he chews.

“Luke, I have—oh, you’ve got it, never mind,” they hear Lucah start and then stop. She’s wandered pretty far away from them, Ian realizes when he glances over his shoulder at her. She’s no more than an orange-haired smear against the periwinkle sky.

“Hey, Ian, there’s a leaf in your hair,” Luke says suddenly, muffled around a mouthful of meat.

Ian twists back to him, his hand flying to his head. “What, really? Where?”

He slides his palm over where Luke’s eyes seem to be stuck, but he feels nothing. Luke chews, swallows hard, and then stretches out his own hand. “Here, here, man,” he murmurs quickly, “I’ll get it for you.”

And Ian doesn’t even have a chance to react before Luke’s fingers are in his hair.

He feels his skin flash white-hot, every single muscle in his entire body going stiff as a board. Luke slides his hand carefully around the side of Ian’s head, his knuckles briefly grazing along the top of Ian’s ear, and Ian’s innards roll with a sudden shiver that he only barely manages to suppress.

Everything around him—the wind, the lapping pondwater, his own breathing—is suddenly muffled. He’s frozen, no more than a statue, as Luke’s fingertips gently wind into a lock of his hair. Luke’s leaning in close to him, so close Ian can see all the different bits of color in his irises. So close he can see the creases on Luke’s lips. So close he could just—could just lean in and—

“Got it,” Luke says, stepping back and letting the offending leaf flutter to the ground. And he turns away, biting down on another piece of beef, as if what he just did was nothing to him.

As if he didn’t just rock Ian’s whole fucking world.

It takes Ian a moment to remember how his legs work. Slowly, stutteringly, he manages to pull himself away and shuffle back to where his shovel is lying. His face feels simultaneously flushed deep red and drained of all blood whatsoever. He’s lightheaded, his poor, stumbling heart knocked all off-rhythm. His knees quiver when he bends to grab his shovel. And his mind, even as he resumes the slow, monotonous process of digging up clay, has very clearly packed itself up and hitchhiked off to _somewhere else_.

He’s at war with himself. The rifles and cannons are firing inside his skull, bullets ricocheting off bone and bombs blowing holes in his gray matter. Because—because—he—

_—What the fuck actually just happened?_

He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know at all. Part of him—a teeny, tiny, way-down-deep part of him—is whispering that that _had_ to mean something. That that was Luke making a move on him or something. But the rest of him, the overwhelming majority, is screaming in answer, _You’re biased! You’re in love with him, and you don’t want to confront the fact that you’re going to be lonely and heartbroken forever, so you’re always going to see things in a romantic light!_ And he doesn’t know which part of himself to listen to, because either way feels like denial. Feels like the truth is sitting there staring him right in the fucking face, but somehow he can’t find it no matter how hard he looks.

He’s sick to his stomach again. His chest has that same tight, achy feeling he’s come to know so well. He’s being torn to shreds by the violent chemical reaction of his desire meeting his understanding that this crush of his is fucking hopeless. The tiny part of him delighting in the fact that Luke touched his hair and got so close to him and the rest of him shouting back that he’s a fucking stupid idiot and he’s only going to fall that much harder if he gets his hopes up. He’s completely distracted, being thrown around in the hurricane in his own mind.

Which is why it makes him physically fucking jump when the handle of his shovel abruptly splinters under his palms.

He feels himself suck in a sharp gasp, his eyes snapping back to reality and darting down to his shovel. And he finds that the entire thing has apparently had enough of scooping up clay, because it’s snapped right in half across the handle, the wood fraying dangerously at both broken ends. He stands there, unmoving, for a moment, just staring blankly at it. The bits of clay on the end of his shovel slide off the head and tumble back into the pond with a series of _plops_. Finally, at last, his brain winds back up to regular speed, and his mouth twists into a frown.

“Uh, my—my shovel’s broken,” he calls out to neither of them in particular.

“Is it really?” Lucah yells back.

“Uh huh.” He holds up the split pieces, one in each hand, high above his head for her to see. And even from far away, he can tell that she’s frowning too.

He lets his arms drop back down heavily. Unlike the meat he gave to Luke, he’s pretty sure nobody’s been carrying around an extra _shovel_ this whole time. Which means he’s going to need to go all the way back home and make himself a new one. Lovely.

But then, Lucah pipes up again: “Damn, y’know, I think mine’s about to go too, actually,” she shouts, gesturing to her own shovel. “So—so how ‘bout I just go back and make us _all_ brand-new ones. _Iron_ ones, not this shitty stone stuff we’ve been using.” He sees a smile flutter across her face. “If we gotta do the dirty work, we may as well treat ourselves, y’know? And we’re good for it; I got a ton of iron when I was down mining for redstone yesterday.”

“Are you sure, Lucah? I can go back if you want to just stay out here,” Luke says from Ian’s other side. And Ian’s kind of baffled that neither of them seem to be seeing the obvious conclusion that, well, y’know, maybe the _guy who’s shovel needs replacing_ should be the one to go perform said replacement. But he doesn’t speak up about it.

“No, you’re fine, I’ve got this. I think I’m—” Lucah giggles, “—I think I’m closer to the house anyway, so…” And she laughs again, a little harder. “Oh god, I fuckin’—I _swear_ this isn’t just me trying to get out of more work. I’ll come right back as soon as I’m done. Twenty—twenty-five minutes, tops. I pinkie promise.”

Luke chuckles as well, waving away her promise with one hand. “Nah, Lucah, take your time. We appreciate it. Ian and I got this clay stuff covered. Right, man?”

He looks at Ian. Ian nods silently.

“That’s true, you _did_ do it for all of yesterday, didn’t you?” Lucah agrees. “Well, I guess I’ll be off, then. See you guys in a hot minute.” And she turns and breaks into a jog away into the distance.

Ian watches her for a moment before facing Luke again.

“Well, I…what do you think I should do now?” He pulls at loose piece of hair that didn’t quite make it into his bun, feeling almost nervous all of a sudden. “‘Cause I don’t have a shovel anymore, so…”

“Just sit down and rest. You deserve it,” Luke cuts in.

“But—”

“No, you seriously deserve it.”

He doesn’t, but. “…Alright.”

He makes his way over to a small, dryish-looking patch of grass near where Luke’s been working. There, he carefully lowers himself to a sit, drawing his thin legs up and resting his arms on his knees. And he studies Luke as he gets back to work, driving his shovel into the mushy lakebed.

Luke’s got a certain cadence to him, in the way that he moves. And not just now, but all the time. When he walks, when he sits down and stands up, when he leans over a crafting table or bumps shut a chest or pulls open a door. He’s just…musical. Moving to the constant beat of the earth in a way Ian just can’t understand.

Even now, his digging is weirdly artful, weirdly easy on the eyes. It almost looks effortless, the way that he lifts the shovel, as if it itself is just an extension of him. He’s just as tall as Ian, if not taller, but he’s so graceful, so in control of all his long limbs. Looking at Luke, Ian feels even more awkward and ungainly than he usually does, and he finds himself reaching up and fiddling with one of his earrings in that way that he does on occasion when he doesn’t know what else to do with himself.

Then, it occurs to him that this is actually the perfect opportunity to roll up some of his clay into balls. He wastes no time in peeling open his bag, reaching in, and pulling out a sloppy handful of clay. Then, he sets to working it between his palms, slowly forming it into a lopsided sphere. When it looks good enough, he places it down in the grass beside him and starts on the next one. Little by little, he goes through the entire contents of his bag, mentally checking it against his own estimations of what he thought he should have. In the end, it turns out that he was a little conservative with his estimates before, and he actually—

A raspy screech.

Ian’s blood goes cold. The clay he’s holding falls from his hands, and he leaps to his feet in his instant. Out of the corner of his vision, he sees a shadowy form diving at him, and his heart stops dead. His fingers scrabble for his sword, for his shield, but he’s too slow. Far too slow.

And the phantom slams into him full-force, throwing him to the ground.

He hits the dirt hard, skidding across and going limp. All the breath is knocked out of his lungs, and he gasps uselessly, his head spinning. Just lying there for a moment, too stunned to even move.

_“Ian!”_

All at once, Luke’s sprinting for him, sword drawn and poised to strike like Ian’s should have been, had he been thinking at all. Ian moves to push himself to a stand, but as soon as he puts his weight on his right arm, a sharp, searing pain shoots down his muscle like lightning, and he chokes out a whimper. And when he grabs at his shoulder, his hand comes away soaked in blood.

He barely has time to process that before Luke’s upon him. “Ian, what’s wrong? Are you okay? What the heck happened?” Luke demands rapid-fire, and Ian’s brain is still swirling too much to answer immediately.

“Phantom. It bit me,” he hisses after a beat, still breathless. He can feel blood running down his bicep beneath his shirt sleeve.

“Oh _crap_ , dude. Where’s it now?” Luke’s head whips back and forth, searching the air. The fact that he doesn’t ever glance upwards, though, immediately tells Ian that he’s never fought one of these before.

“Up there,” Ian mumbles, bracing his weight on his left arm and drawing himself back up to his feet. Luke looks over at him, and he lifts a shaky finger towards where the phantom is swirling around high above him like some kind of massive vulture. Even from below, Ian catches flashes of its glowing green eyes. Thin trails of gray smoke emanate from its massive wings, the feathers shredded and misshapen like torn scraps of fabric. Its body is a deep sapphire blue, a dark, ominous stain against the paleness of the sky beyond.

“Oh crap,” Luke says again, hushed. His eyes are wide as he takes it in. “Where’d that guy _come from?_ ”

“I…” Ian feels a little woozy, and he shifts his weight to his other leg. “…I don’t know. They just kinda…show up.”

And he kind of hopes that Luke doesn’t know what _makes_ them show up in the first place.

Keeping his gaze locked on the phantom, Ian adjusts his grip on his sword. As nasty as the phantoms are, at least they wait a little bit between attacks. The thing makes another wide arc in the air, and then it screeches loudly again, tucking its wings to its body and entering into a second sharp dive.

This time, Ian’s ready. He throws up his shield, leaning into it, bracing himself. And when the phantom crashes into him, _it’s_ the one sent reeling away with a squawk, momentarily dazed.

“Get ‘im!” Luke hollers, and he swings his sword at the phantom. He connects through feathers and flesh, and the phantom emits a harsh growl of pain. Ian rushes at it too, but it flaps its wings and soars out of the way at the last second, leaving fat drop of blood falling to the ground like rain.

It doesn’t stay away for long, though. After just a few recovery circles, it’s back again, divebombing Ian and meeting the hard wood of his shield, its eyes flashing in vicious rage. Ian and Luke both drive their swords into it in unison, landing two more direct hits that spill blood in a spray. But instead of retreating back into the skies, it does a tight, blurring loop around them, whooshing through the swamp grass in a hard gust of wind. Ian tries to stay focused on it, but its too quick in such close quarters. And he’s completely caught off-guard when it nails him from behind, pitching him into the dirt face-down.

He feels its razor-like teeth scrape against the back of his chestplate in a flutter of wings and yells in alarm, swinging blindly with his sword. He frantically rolls himself onto his back just in him to see Luke throw himself at it, stabbing it again through the wing. It instantly tumbles to the ground, beating its one good wing in desperate attempt to take flight again. But Luke’s already on it, thrusting its sword down through the very center of its body, and Ian hears the _snap_ of its exposed spine breaking. Blood pours out of in a crimson gush, and it convulses violently. Luke yanks his sword back with a _slurch_ and plunges it back down, and finally, with one last hoarse cry, the phantom goes still. Dead.

Luke’s panting. Both of them are, actually. Luke’s eyes slowly swivel to take hold of Ian’s. “ _Bump_ that, dude. _Bump_ that,” he heaves out. “Those things are flippin’ _scary._ Holy crap.”

Ian’s hand finds his shoulder, wincing at the sting of his shredded, bitten-up skin. He can tell the bleeding has already begun to slow, though, which is a relief. It sure wouldn’t help their chances at success here if he was out of action too.

“Yo, Ian, are you gonna be okay? We should probably go back home and get you taken care of,” Luke says, then, his eyebrows knitted with a kind of worry that makes Ian feel a little uncomfortable.

“No, yeah. I’ll…I’ll be fine. It’s fine,” he answers, shaking his head slightly. The phantom’s blood has started to trickle into a nearby pond, silk-like clouds of red billowing slowly in the yellowy water. He watches it for a few, long seconds before turning back to Luke.

And then, something happens to Luke’s face. A visible realization crossing over him that Ian really, _really_ doesn’t like. His eyes narrow, and he takes a halting step towards Ian that has Ian taking three back away from him.

“Hey,” Luke starts slowly, his voice low. “You haven’t been sleeping?”

He knows. Of course he knows. He’s not stupid. Not like Ian is.

“Well, I—”

But Ian doesn’t know what to say. He was pretty sure he _had_ been sleeping, at least a little bit, but with the phantom coming for him…

“…No, I guess not,” he mumbles at long last, his shoulders hunching. “Not…not really.”

And the look of pure disappointment that Luke gives him makes him want to curl up in a hole and die.

“C’mon, Ian. You gotta take care of yourself,” he chides, the words so painfully soft.

Ian wraps his arms around himself. “I know, I know, I just—I’ve been—I don’t know.”

“I _thought_ you’ve seemed kinda tired lately. Listen, you have to let your body rest. You’ll burn yourself out real quick if you don’t recharge sometimes. It’s not good for you.”

“I—I know, but…”

Luke leans forward, his hand reaching out but stopping short of actually touching Ian. “I’m worried about you, man,” he murmurs. “Seriously. We got a long road ahead of us, and I don’t want you overdoing it. I need to know that you’re going to be alright when we—”

“What’s the point? We’re all going to die anyway.”

He doesn’t even realize the words are on his tongue until they’ve already slipped out. Luke freezes in place, losing track of whatever he was just in the middle of saying, and his eyes widen slightly.

“…What do you mean?” he says warily.

“I mean, well—we’re all gonna die,” Ian repeats, forcing out a dry chuckle that he gags on. “I dunno, it seems like it’s obvious by now that there’s no way in hell we’re gonna win. Us dying is…it’s inevitable, basically.”

Luke cocks his head. “How do _you_ know that, though? That’s definitely not inevitable, Ian, I don’t know what—”

“We don’t know what the fuck we’re doing!” Ian explodes, and Luke jerks back in surprise. “We’re just—fuckin’— _bumbling_ our way through this! Everyone who knows what the hell is going on is either dying or already dead!”

“Ian—”

Ian throws out his arms, his jaw tightening. He doesn’t know where all this is coming from, but now that it’s started, it’s all just pouring out of him like a broken faucet.

“We can’t do this, I’m telling you. We’re just—we’re nothing. We’re useless. _I’m_ useless. Even if we _do_ somehow actually make the trade with the villagers to get the map, we’re never going to be able to survive inside the mansion. I don’t—honestly, I don’t know why we’re even trying so hard here. None of this is going to matter in a week anyway.” He lowers his chin, glaring down at nothing, his words now coming out in a harsh mutter. “It’s too late. It’s done, it’s over—we _lost_. We lost the minute fucking Stewart back there caught the plague. It’s stupid to pretend like we can actually still do this. At this point, I feel like I’m just sitting around waiting for it to be over so I can try again next time.”

And, in horror, Ian feels his eyes suddenly start to burn with tears. He blinks hard, trying to force them away, but his vision just grows blurrier and blurrier. So he clamps his lips shut and says nothing else, pressing his fist roughly over his mouth.

This sucks. This really, really sucks. He always knew it sucked, but it’s only just now hitting him how much of a toll this world has taken on him. He would have liked to win, honestly, because who doesn’t? But now, all he wants is to just _die_. To put an end to all this shit. This limbo—this perma-suspension between winning and losing, this life utterly devoid of any sort of hope or purpose—has been slowly devouring him for weeks now like an eclipse of moths to a sheer piece of fabric.

And now, his last bit of strength has finally been eaten away.

He runs his hands down his face, his eyes still stinging sharply, and lets out a shuddery breath. The wind blows across him in irregular blasts, whipping his loose pieces of hair about, but he barely even notices anymore. A few feet away, Luke’s simply staring at him, gaze wholly unreadable in a way that makes Ian incredibly uneasy. Then, Luke’s eyes suddenly dip down in thought, and after another moment, he shakes his head slowly, his shoulders lowering.

“No,” he says quietly, at last. “Honestly, I—I get where you’re coming from, I do, but I think you’re wrong. The odds might be crazy stacked against us, sure; you’re right that things are really flippin’ hard with no regulars around to help us. But we _can_ still do this, Ian. Us dying is nowhere near guaranteed. You shouldn’t give up hope so soon.”

Ian shrugs. “Okay.”

He viscerally disagrees with basically everything Luke just said, but he’s not about to get into a fight with him. He just wants to finish this clay bullshit, go back home, and collapse in his bed for another long night of not sleeping before he gets up again and steps outside to get killed by some more phantoms.

Honestly, he wishes he never even opened his big, fat trap in the first place. Lucah always says that it feels good to vent your feelings, but he feels so much worse now than he ever would’ve if he’d just kept them bottled up inside. At least then sometimes he could actually forget about them. But now, he’s dredged them up to the surface of his consciousness and let them spill all over everything. It’s a big fucking mess.

So he hopes that Luke will just accept his non-answer and let the whole issue drop. But apparently even _that_ is too much to ask for, because Luke shakes his head again, more forcefully this time, and takes a step forward.

“No, no, Ian, I mean it. I don’t know how long you’ve been feeling, like, y’know—” he gestures abstractly, “—like _this_ about everything, but—

“Listen, it’s fine. Don’t worry about me. We should get back to work.”

Ian twists away, but all at once, Luke’s hand is on his good shoulder, stopping him in his tracks. “Hey, no. Look at me.”

And Ian does, even though he doesn’t want to. Luke’s eyes are dark with that same, earnest seriousness Ian’s come to know so well from him. And something about them just is so, so pretty that Ian feels his heart start to tumble out from under his ribs.

“You got this, Ian. I believe in you,” Luke says, then, pulling Ian from his trance. And Ian blinks at him, processing for a moment.

“I—”

“You said you’re useless, but that’s not true at all,” Luke continues in a gentle, smooth tone that rounds out all the edges of his words. “You’re so tough. You, like, _know_ this stuff. You’re the one who’s been guiding us through this. You’re our leader here, and me and Lucah both appreciate you so much.”

 _What the fuck?_ Ian’s brain goes, and he only barely manages to keep it from slipping out of his mouth too.

“What? No, I—I’m not a—a _leader_.” He holds up his hands, momentarily at an absolute loss for words. “I can’t figure out this shit. I’m just kinda going along with whatever you and Lucah say.”

“Really? Because I remember you completely taking charge of our whole trip to the village the other day.”

“Well—I mean, I didn’t actually _do_ anything, though,” Ian stutters out. He really didn’t. All that needed to be done was talking to a few villagers, finding out their trades, and going home. Maybe he was the one who did most of the talking, but literally anyone with half a brain could’ve been equally successful.

But Luke only raises a disbelieving eyebrow at him. “Sure you did. You’re the one who realized right away we wouldn’t be able to just go mining for emeralds. It was _your_ idea to find that second villager who’s gonna give us the emeralds for the clay balls. If it had been me all alone there— _pfft,_ forget it. I would’ve messed everything up, easy.”

“I—I—but—”

Ian starts to dig his fingers into his hair almost unconsciously, but then Luke grabs at his hands, pulling them away and clasping them tightly in his own.

“Hey, for real, you _are_ a leader, Ian,” he says, looking into Ian’s eyes. “Ever since McJones got sick, you’ve really, really stepped up. You’ve been on top of literally almost _everything_. Planning ahead for the mansion, doing all the trading, taking care of Hexie—all of it, _you’ve_ been the one leading us through. You—you’re so good, man. Don’t underestimate yourself.”

Ian stands there for a moment, as still and stony as a statue. Then, feeling almost as if he’s waking up suddenly from a daze, he jerks his hands away from Luke’s and takes a shuffling step back.

“Yeah, right,” he mutters, more to himself than Luke, almost. “I couldn’t lead anyone out of a wet paper bag. I mean, I couldn’t even kill one fucking phantom on my own just now; I probably would’ve _died_ if you hadn’t helped me there, y’know.”

“You wouldn’t have…”

But Luke just trails off. And after a second, he rubs his hand across the stubble on his jawline, looking away. Finally giving up on Ian. Finally recognizing that Ian’s a lost cause. Took him long enough.

And even though this is exactly what Ian wanted, he still feels like shit. He feels like shit as he turns his back on Luke as well, bending and reaching for his shovel before he remembers that, oh right, it’s fucking broken, and that’s how he got here in this situation in the first place. He feels like shit as he lets his arms drop back down limply by his sides, his whole body feeling like it’s been filled up to the brim with pure mercury. And he especially feels like shit as he looks out across the drab swampscape, yearning for somewhere else— _anywhere_ else—to be right now.

But there’s nowhere else. Nowhere at all. He’s trapped here, stuck here in this god-fucking swamp with nothing to do but accept the long slide to oblivion he’s found himself on.

\---

That night, once again, Ian can’t sleep. But it’s a different kind of _can’t sleep_ than before. In previous nights, his mind was too lit up with a million different things to let him be at peace, the fireworks of all his thoughts bursting one after another and keeping him awake. But tonight, right now, all he feels is drained. And not in a good way, in a _pass-out-as-soon-as-your-head-hits-the-pillow_ way, and neither is it in a cathartic, tranquil way. He’s just so debilitated, feeling like his limbs are going to just snap off any second now, that somehow, it’s keeping him wide-awake, as paradoxical as that seems.

He’s never going to talk about his feelings ever again.

It’s all weighing on him at once, like a massive boulder sitting on his chest and slowly sinking lower and lower, crushing all of his organs one inch at a time. Everything he’s been through in this world, piled up like a teetering, eroding mountain on the verge of crumbling into the sea.

The swamp. The village. The clay. The woodland mansion, like a far-off dream. Jeff and Dean walking out of their house to never be seen again, their bodies lying cold among the piles of fallen sand at the bottom of that goddamn ravine. Austin on his knees, gasping, blood pouring from a deep hole in his abdomen growing black around the edges from wither poison. McJones looking glassy-eyed and pale but waving off their concern, saying _I’m fine, I’m fine_ , until he couldn’t anymore because he wasn’t anymore. And the words that Lucah is too kind to ever say but that Ian can see plain as day on her face every time she leaves his sick room: _He’s dying. He doesn’t have much time left._

And Luke. Luke smiling at Ian. Luke watching him as he draws. Luke clutching his hand, helping him up from the ground. Luke petting Hexie, held in Ian’s arms. Luke saying _I love you_ so seriously and openly that Ian could almost imagine he really meant it. Luke plucking the leaf from his hair with featherlight fingers. Luke looking at him with those fucking puppy dog eyes and trying to assure him that they still have a shot at survival.

All of the images and memories swirl around Ian like a dense, vision-obscuring fog, pressing in on him until he feels like he’s losing the ability to breathe. He flops around in his bed, testing out every sleeping position he can think of, but nothing works. Nothing is enough to make him feel even remotely comfortable or okay. His body is simultaneously too hot and too cold, and the mattress beneath him is simultaneously too hard and too soft, and the bandages on his hurt shoulder are simultaneously too loose and too tight, he himself is simultaneously too tired and too awake. With every minute that ticks by, he can sense his marbles rolling away one by one.

Honestly, he really is at his wit’s end here. This one more night of sleeplessness is the straw that’s breaking the camel’s back. He just doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do anymore. He barely even knows what he’s been doing _up until_ _now_. He’s confused, he’s stressed. He’s lovesick, he’s exhausted, he’s despondent. He’s a human smoothie of emotions, and he can’t stop himself from being put through the blender over and over and over again until he’s nothing but a mess all over the kitchen.

So, after another long hour or so of failing to make his body and his head both shut the fuck up and let him sleep, Ian does something he’s never done before: He gets up and goes outside.

He doesn’t know why he does it; it’s not as if there’s anything out there that he hasn’t seen a million times before. But this bedroom—this whole _house_ , really—has suddenly started to feel confining, as if the volume of everything pressing down on his shoulders is too great to be contained within four walls. Plus, he finds that the thought of getting some fresh air immediately makes his heart lift with anticipation—no more than a centimeter or two, but that’s more excitement than he’s felt in a long, long while, so he’s just going to roll with it for now. 

Sitting up and feeling his loose hair tumble down his back, he slides his legs out from beneath the blankets carefully so as to not disturb Hexie, who’s asleep at the very foot of the bed. As he pushes himself to a stand, he sees her shift slightly, unwinding her sleek tail and splaying out one of her tiny paws in the most adorable way. But fortunately, she doesn’t seem to wake. Ian looks at her for a moment before bending and lightly running two fingers across the top of her head in a gentle pet. Then, with a quiet exhale, he tiptoes to the bedroom door, eases it open, and slips out into the main of the house.

He tries to be as quiet as he can, but it’s actually pretty fucking dark, and he finds himself bumping into pretty much every obstacle that’s physically available to be bumped into. Eventually, after taking a table corner to the gut and the edge of a chest to the pinkie toe, he manages to blunder his way over to the front door and find his boots. Once he slides them firmly on—stopping briefly to massage his stubbed toe—he reaches for the door. But a sudden thought makes him pause, and, after a few seconds, he doubles back into the dining room long enough to hit his knee on the side of the furnace and then pluck his sword and shield from where they’re lying, carelessly thrown on top of some chest. Just a little something to defend himself if any monsters or phantoms or whatever come after him, he thinks. He doesn’t have much of a stake in his presence in this world anymore, of course, but still. He’d kinda like to not die from a surprise creeper explosion in the middle of the night.

Tucking the hilt of his sword beneath his armpit, he fumbles with the doorknob before pushing it open and stepping out into the night. And immediately, he realizes that it’s _exactly_ what he needed. The first thing that hits him as he stands there, just beyond the threshold of their house, is the wind. It’s _way_ winder than it was during the day—way winder than Ian can remember it ever being here, even—and it whooshes violently through his shirt and his pants as if they’re not even there. His bed-tangled hair billows out behind him like some kind of Disney princess, and goosebumps almost instantly break out on the back of his neck. Above, the barely-waning moon washes the land in a faint, eerie, silver glow, and he can see thousands of minuscule stars like scattered paint droplets polka-dotting the navy-blue canvas of the sky. And best of all, that murky, fishy, _swamp_ smell is nowhere to be…well, _smelt_ ; the air is flooded with a sharp, earthy scent that Ian can only think to describe as _night_.

And he loves it.

He loves it all so much. The sound of the wind, the smell of the night, the sight of the stars—it’s absolutely beautiful. Beautiful in a way that touches the deepest parts of him. Beautiful in a way that sings to him on the instinctive level. He is a being. An animal in the world, at the mercy of nature. And here is, finally gazing upon his goddess Mother Earth. His Mother Earth, who could bring down her unyielding fist of time on him at any moment, but who, with her other hand, weaves these breathtaking tapestries and deigns to hang them up on her wall and allow all of her children to witness them.

He doesn’t know why he’s never thought to come out at night before—not only here, but in previous worlds as well. He’s almost mad at himself that all this has been right here waiting for him to find, and yet he never knew until now. He wouldn’t even mind if a creeper snuck up behind him and blew him to shreds right now, because at least then he’d have died to experience _this_.

What’s more, with Luke, Lucah, McJones, and Hexie all fast asleep, it feels like he’s the only person in the world. And it surprises him how much he likes that, how the thought of it sets his heart aflutter in his chest. He’s never thought himself to be much of a loner. Well, that’s not true—he spent a long time _wholeheartedly_ believing he was a loner before he realized that what he actually is a big, giant loser who’s an introvert but also desperately craves human contact. But now, right now, he’s content to just _be_. To be one with the world. To be all alone, a single stitch in Mother Earth’s vast tapestry.

He has no idea how long he stands there, just staring out at everything around him. He has the sensation of drowning, almost, but in a good way. Like instead of dying, he’s coming back to life. He’s waking up, some subconscious, knotted-up part of him coming undone at last.

After a while, his feels his legs starting to get a little bit tired. He considers just sitting down on the ground right where he is, but it’s damp, and he doesn’t particularly want to go back to bed with a wet ass. So instead, he pads through the grass back over to the house, coming to a stop beside the outside wall. He looks upwards for a moment, judging, gauging. Slowly, he lowers himself to a squat. And then, with a forceful inhale, he jumps.

His hands just barely catch the edge of the roof, and he _pulls_. With all his strength, pulls himself up, grunting between clenched teeth. He rolls clumsily onto the side of the angled roof, stumbling forward and almost falling off when he tries to clamber to a stand. But he manages to catch his balance and his breath, feeling his pulse smooth back out into a more regular rhythm.

Carefully, he lowers himself into a sit, kicking his legs forward so that they dangle off the side of the roof. He braces his hands behind him, loosely clinging onto the sanded-down, saw-tooth woodwork. And he sits, just sits there. Just gazing up at the stars again, so utterly lost in them. His eyes trace them, stretching imaginary lines between them and trying to pick out any constellations that lie there within. Constellations are another thing that fascinates him. Just the thought that people so long ago tilted their heads skyward just as he is and looked out at these very same stars. And, too, the thought that the stars meant so much to them that they made pictures out of them— _real_ pictures with real, real meanings. Ursa major, ursa minor. Andromeda, chained to her rock. Orion, bearing his sword and shield. Gemini, the twins. Virgo, the maiden. Sagittarius, the archer. Pisces, the fish. All of them, arranged together in the sky like in a great banquet. A gathering of old gods, of figures embedded in the sky for all of time.

Maybe Ian should try to make up a constellation of his own sometime, he thinks to himself almost whimsically. That could be fun. Hard, but fun. Pinpointing the stars that stand out to him the most in the night sky, connecting them to form a picture, breathing life and history into that picture, and finally taking his brush to the paper and painting it. He can already almost see it in his mind’s eye, still contemplating the dark, inky spread above him, what colors he would use for the sky, how he would stipple, stipple, stipple his brush across the parchment to fill in the starts little by little, the way he’d—

“Hey,” comes a sudden voice.

“— _Oh my god_ ,” Ian gasps out in shock, jolting so hard he almost throws himself clean off the roof. But he catches himself at the last second, grabbing at the wood and scooting himself back. He cautiously peers down to find Luke standing there, almost directly below him, staring up with furrowed brows.

“Oh, man, I’m sorry,” Luke calls up, his voice loud enough to be audible but still hushed. “I really didn’t mean to scare you.”

“It—it’s fine.” Ian licks his lips. Already, he can feel his gut starting to tighten again. He wasn’t ready to return to the real world, but it seems the real world has made that decision for him. “I just didn’t expect anyone to be, y’know… _up_ right now.”

“Yeah,” Luke says, and Ian sees the corner of his mouth curve into a tiny smile. “Mind if I join you for a bit?”

What a question. Knowing Luke, it’s absolutely intended as a genuine ask of permission—and Luke would absolutely fuck off back inside and leave Ian alone if Ian had the nuts to tell him to—but it’s an absolutely fucking loaded question to Ian’s ears.

“No, I don’t mind,” he says after a moment, and Luke’s smile grows a little bit wider.

Just like yesterday, with the witch hut, he backs up to get a running start. When he breaks into a run and hits the jump at precisely the right time, his hands easily catch the edge of the roof. And he hauls himself right up in the same way Ian did, but as always, his movements are much more graceful. So graceful Ian’s mouth feels a little dry as Luke eases down beside him, somehow both too close and not close enough.

Does he even know how beautiful he is? Ian hopes he knows, but something about the casual, nonchalant way he carries himself—like he doesn’t have any idea that he’s constantly shining with this entrancing, inner glow—makes Ian suspect that probably he doesn’t. Which is a real fucking shame, if you ask him.

Ian’s staring, he realizes. He quickly glances away with a jerk of his head, clearing his throat awkwardly into his cupped hands.

“Is this what you do when you’re not sleeping like you should be?” Luke asks, then.

Ian glances back at him. “No. I usually just lay there and stare at the ceiling.”

It wasn’t a joke, but Luke laughs in this tinkly way that makes Ian’s heart squeeze. He runs his fingers roughly through his hair, suddenly hyper-aware of how _just-rolled-out-of-bed_ he probably looks. Christ, he hasn’t shaved in a bit either, has he? His facial hair is definitely looking a bit too scraggly for his tastes.

He’s a fucking disaster of a person. God almighty.

Neither of them says anything else for a minute or two. They simply sit there, side by side, looking out at the dusky swampland. As much as Ian tries to recapture that same, Zen tranquility that had fallen over him before, he’s just too unsettled now. He keeps finding himself sneaking peeks at Luke out of the corner of his eye, even as much as he tries to keep his stare fixed forward.

Luke swallows. In the low moonlight, Ian sees his Adam’s apple bob. Sees the glimmer of his eyelashes as he blinks, nice and slow and languid.

Ian’s heart is currently sitting somewhere around his frontal lobe.

Finally, Luke reclines slightly, propping himself up on his forearms and releasing a long, delicate sigh through his slightly-pursed lips. “This is nice,” he murmurs.

“Huh?” Ian says reflexively, even though he heard Luke the first time.

Luke turns to look at him, stretching out a hand towards the heavens. “Y’know, this. It’s peaceful out here at night. Pretty good breeze, too.”

“Oh.” Ian pulls his legs up to his body, resting his chin on his knees. “Yeah. It is.”

“This is why you draw all those pictures of nature stuff, isn’t it? I’m not much of a—y’know, a pencil-‘n-paper artist like you are, but—but I get it now, I think.”

“Uh, actually, n—”

And Ian’s about to say _no_ , the syllable already forming on his lips, but then it dies away to nothing. Because it abruptly hits him that Luke’s right; this is _exactly_ why he loves to draw plants and natural landscapes and all that sort of stuff. It’s this kind of thing, this experience of being surrounded by nothing but nature, that really inspires him above all. Hell, he was even just considering painting up a brand-new constellation of his own.

He’s been in love with Mother Nature this whole time. A tangled affair that courses through his veins in a deep rush, growing stronger now that he’s finally turned his whole focus on it. It’s odd, though, that it never actually occurred to him until Luke just pointed it out.

“…Yeah,” Ian finishes eventually, shrugging once and then a second time. “I—I guess so. Yeah.”

“Very cool,” Luke replies with a slow nod.

Silence falls again between them. Ian’s kind of starting to wonder what brought Luke out here in the first place, but he’s too nervous to ask. He laces his fingers together over his thighs, twiddling his thumbs almost but not quite. Letting out a breath that’s too loud and forceful but still leaves his lungs feeling overly full.

“Hey, can I ask you something?”

And the words burst out of him before he even realizes they’re there. But the very instant he voices them, he realizes that there’s this one thing sticking in his craw most out of everything. It’s been there in the background, stewing and festering ever since this afternoon. And now, it feels like the bubble’s grown so big it’s just gone ahead and burst at the most inopportune time.

“Of course, go ‘head,” Luke says with a slight nod. Ian meets his eyes for a half-second before the honesty and openness in his pupils becomes too overwhelming, and his gaze quickly bounces away again. His lips feel kind of funny and tingly, and he idly runs his tongue over them a few times, his mind racing itself in circles.

Then, he notes, with a wry, inward smile, that he’s already breaking his promise to never, ever discuss his feelings again. He can’t do anything right, can he?

“What’s up, Ian?” Luke presses after a few moments, when Ian doesn’t continue. “You can tell me anything. You know that, right? I’m here for you, man.”

 _Yeah,_ Ian tries to say, but it gets stuck in his throat. He gulps a little bit and then tries again: “Earlier. Before.” He’s looks down at his hands. “You—you said you believed in me.”

“Yeah…?” Luke responds slowly, still watching Ian as he starts to fidget. He sort of wishes Luke would keep talking and buy him more time to think about what exactly he’s trying to say here, but Luke just sits there, respectfully and patiently remaining quiet. Giving Ian the floor he’d really rather not have.

“I just—y’know, I don’t—I’m not—” And Ian makes a strangled noise, throwing up his hands in a rough gesture. “ _Why_?” he blurts all at once. “ _Why_ the hell would you say something like that? I—I don’t get it.”

“Because.” Luke lowers his chin, no more than an inch. His eyes don’t leave Ian’s for even a single second. “I see you, and I know you’re someone worth believing in.”

Damn it.

Damn it, damn it, damn it. _Damn him_ and his fucking smooth-ass lines. Ian feels the tops of his cheeks start to go tingly in that way he’s familiar with by now but still nowhere _near_ used to. His fingers stay frozen, curled pointlessly in the air.

“Okay, okay—but—but, like—” he splutters, “—when have I ever given you any evidence that I’m someone you should put your trust in? How are you just _deciding_ that I—that I deserve your belief or whatever?

Luke’s forehead wrinkles. “Ian,” he says in this tone that Ian really, really doesn’t like, because it makes him feel like _he’s_ the crazy one in this situation, and he’s about eighty to eighty-seven percent sure that’s not true.

“What? I—I just want you to explain it to me, okay, please, because I don’t have a fucking clue why you think _I’m_ —”

He can’t even finish the sentence. He just shakes his head harshly. Letting the words he’s already spoken fill in the gaps for him.

“Ian,” Luke murmurs again after a pause that feels like it lasts several eternities, “I—I dunno what to else say, honestly. I feel like I already told you all my feelings before, when we were out getting clay today. Everything I told you a-about how you’ve been leading Lucah and I through all of this—I meant it, okay?”

He gazes at Ian, very obviously willing him to understand. And Ian—really, deep down inside of him, he _wants_ it all to be true so badly. He wants to be the kind of amazing, powerful, stalwart person Luke apparently sees when he looks at him. He wants to be the one who can beat the odds and lead the three of them to glorious and triumphant victory. But it’s just—he really doesn’t think that’s who he is. At all. And he feels like it would be so fucking naïve to just buy into that rosy perception of himself with how clearly false it rings in chest.

At last, his mouth twists, and he just mutters, “Thanks. I guess. I mean, I’m not that cool. I haven’t really done anything.” He fiddles with the hem of his shirt around his waist as it flutters in the wind. “Like, ever.”

“I think you’re super cool,” Luke retorts immediately. “And yo, you’ve done a _ton_ of awesome stuff. Don’t say that.”

Ian doesn’t reply. He chews his lip, staring out unfocusedly at the horizon through angled, half-lidded eyes. But then, right then, _completely_ fucking out of nowhere, he feels Luke slide a hand over top of his. And his entire _being_ instantly erupts into butterflies.

Slowly, falteringly, he lifts his head to look up at Luke, his heart breaking into a breathless sprint. His jaw tumbles open, and he makes this garbled noise that can’t quite coalesce itself into an actual word. Luke squeezes his hand, seeming almost oblivious to the way he’s undoing Ian at the very core.

“Hey. Listen. I—I really like you, man,” he says, low. “It really sucks seeing you down like this. I’ve been worried about you all day, since you said that stuff about this world being hopeless. And I just want you to know that I care a lot about you, and I believe in you no matter what. Alright?”

And Ian’s stupid fucking traitor of a brain quickly finds itself stuck on one, single part of that monologue. And that’s the piece of him that makes him choke out without even a _shred_ of forethought, “I really like you too.”

Luke smiles in a slow and gentle way that has Ian wanting to sob with it. “Yeah. You’re one of my best friends, man. I love spending time with you. I’m so glad that I got to know you here,” he responds.

Ian feels lightheaded all of a sudden. Like his brain is trying to crawl out of his skull, and he can’t do a thing to stop it.

“No, I—” he swallows hard. “I mean I _like_ you.” _Shut up shut up shut up shut up shut the fuck up you absolute fucking idiot._ “Like, actually have f—feelings for you.”

And there it is. Shattering through the blustery night air like a bomb. Past the point of no return, plunging headlong into the black hole.

“…Oh.”

Luke shifts. The expression on his face can only be described as stunned. Distinctly stunned in a way that makes panic well up in every orifice of Ian’s body.

“Oh god. Oh god,” he starts to babble. _You moron, this is your fucking fault_ , his brain spits. _Why didn’t you stop yourself when you had the chance? You deserve this._ “I’m sorry, that was fucking weird. I didn’t—y’know, never mind. Just forget I said that. Don’t—don’t—it’s not a big deal. Forget it. I’m—I’m gonna go back to bed. I’m really tired. Okay. Yeah.”

He’s dying, dying, dying. Every inch of him is shriveling away and dying. His fingers scrabble at the saw-tooth roofing, trying to push himself away, off this goddamn house, trying to escape this horrible situation he’s created all by himself with his own bare hands. But he vaguely senses, somewhere underneath all the terror, Luke jerking forward and reaching for him.

“Hey, hey, no, Ian, it’s okay. I—”

His hand touches Ian’s shoulder, and Ian whirls back around, his esophagus overflowing with more apologies and excuses and anything he can conjure up to somehow fix this in any little way he can.

And then Luke’s lips are on the corner of his mouth.

It almost takes a second to register. Luke’s lips. On his mouth. Kissing him. Kissing him warm and soft and gentle. Everything Luke himself is. Everything Ian has always wanted.

And in that very moment, he lurches forward and dives headlong into the abyss.

He doesn’t know when his fists found their way into the collar of Luke’s shirt, but they’re there now, grabbing desperately at Luke and pulling him in. He’s pretty sure that he’s kissing Luke back, but he’s not entirely positive. All he can really feel is Luke’s mouth, hot and rich and _completely fucking inexplicable_ , smushed slightly off-kilter against his.

And when they finally separate, Ian feels like he really did die.

Luke pulls back, studying him cautiously. Almost worriedly, like he’s afraid Ian’s just going to fall to bits right in front of him. And honestly, that’s not outside of the realm of possibility. Ian feels paralyzed, absolutely rooted in place. He’s looking and listening and tasting and feeling and smelling, but none of the stimuli he finds actually penetrate his mind in any meaningful way. He’s completely in a stupor, still trying to fully process what just happened.

Luke kissed him.

He confessed to Luke—

—And then Luke kissed him.

Really kissed him.

After a long, long, _long_ moment, Ian manages to regain some semblance of control over his eyeballs, and he gingerly swivels them back to Luke. Who’s sitting there. Pressing his knuckles to his lips as if he’s hurt them. Hurt them from _kissing Ian._

“No,” Ian says, the word pouring shakily out of his mouth.

“Yeah,” Luke answers softly, somehow recognizing it as the question it was intended to be. His cheeks are pink. His cheeks are pink, he’s blushing, _he’s blushing_ —

And Luke must see something in Ian’s face, because his eyes widen, and he presses a concerned hand to Ian’s arm. “Yo, you good, man?”

“I—”

And then, all at once, Ian’s eyes fill up.

“Oh, no, man, are you okay?” Luke says urgently, eyebrows knitting. “I’m so sorry, did I—”

“No—no—” Ian sniffs hard, rubbing his fist across his eyes. “I don’t—I don’t fucking know why I’m—”

Why the fuck is he crying? He should be _happy_ , because it’s looking like somehow, by some fucking _astronomical, lighting-strike_ chance, Luke has feelings for him too. But he’s still having trouble wrapping his mind around all of this, honestly. It feels surreal, like this whole time he’s been in a dream all along. And only now is he starting to notice that the pieces don’t add up to the real world.

“I—I swear, I’m just—I didn’t—I didn’t think you’d ever—” he whispers, his voice hoarse and watery and breaking on almost every word he tries to force out.

“Hey. It’s okay, you’re okay.” Luke’s hand is on his back now, rubbing slow circles across his shoulder blades. “Just take deep breaths for me, okay?”

Ian sniffs hard, gasping a little bit with it, and drags the back of his fist roughly across his teary eyes. “I’m s-sorry. I—sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. I know I just kind of dropped that on you.” Luke’s fingertips trail gently over his spin, making him shiver a little bit. “I—I should’ve asked first, I think. That was too much to put on you all at once.”

“No, it’s fine. It—it’s fine.” Ian sniffs again, his nose stinging sharply.

It’s starting to set in now, the dreamlike feeling of this situation dripping away, that Luke actually, seriously, honest-to-god kissed him. And it was a kiss with meaning, too. It was light and tender and oh-so-unassuming, but it was _real_. Ian can feel in in all of himself, from the outermost layers of his skin all the way through his bones, that Luke meant every little touch of that kiss.

Which is absolutely ridiculous to say, even just inside his head. But Ian knows it’s true. He knows it’s true. As absurd as it is, he can’t even fight it for a second.

They remain there, unspeaking, for a few minutes. Luke with his hand resting comfortingly on Ian’s back, and Ian still weeping a little bit despite his best efforts. Both of them, sitting there on the roof of their house, surrounding by the billowing wind and the endless star-studded sky. There’s something beautiful about it, in kind of a stupid way.

Luke’s the one to eventually break the silence.

“Well, I mean it,” he murmurs. “I _like_ you, Ian. You’re—” and Ian sees his cheeks flush an even darker shade of rose, “—you’re a great guy. I always think about you a lot. You’re really, really, mind-blowingly talented, and you have a great sense of humor, and you’re pretty cute, and it—it just makes me so happy whenever I get to see _you_ being happy.” He looks down, sideways, giving a slight, audibly flustered, laugh. “I…I’ve liked you for a while, honestly.”

And that’s a lot of stuff that Ian doesn’t have the energy to contemplate right now. So he files it all away for later, when he has more time to obsess and overthink and just generally freak out about everything. At the moment, for once in his life, he finds that he’s physically too tired to stay wound up, and he can feel himself slackening by the minute. It’s oddly refreshing, in a way.

“Uh, okay. If you say so,” is all he says, playing with a loose piece of his hair, winding it around and around on his pointer finger. And then, despite everything, he breaks into a sharp chuckle of his own. “I mean, I feel like you’re getting the short end of the stick here, but…”

Luke nudges him with an elbow. “C’mon, you can’t say that stuff about yourself. I’ll tell Lucah on you if you don’t get some self-esteem.”

“Please don’t. She’ll make me talk to her for, like, literally _hours_.”

“Well, honestly, it seems like you might need some good talking time, actually.”

Ian can’t argue with that, so he just doesn’t reply at all. But for once, the hush between them feels almost comfortable, in a way. Like they’re not saying anything because there’s nothing to be said, rather than because they’re too afraid to speak. After a few seconds, Luke withdraws his hand from Ian’s back, and tentatively, he eases his arm all the way around Ian’s shoulders. Ian pauses for a beat, his heart thrumming in his wrists, before just giving up and letting himself melt into the crook of Luke’s arm. And it feels like to him, as he sits there with his head against Luke’s chest, cradled delicately in his hold, that he’s finally, finally come home.

And together they sit, staring out at the steadily rising moon, immersed in their own sort of peace.

\---

“Hey. We—we’ve got your sh—uh, your stuff.”

They’re back at the forest village, Ian and Luke. It’s a couple of days later, and they’ve been up since the asscrack of morning. Most of that time has been spent just walking, trudging their way across the swampland to get back here to hand off their hard-earned goods, but a little bit of it has been devoted to periodically making sure everything’s ready for what they need to do today. They’ve built the compass, and they’ve finished gathering every last bit of clay they need and rolling it all into semi-even balls. And they’ve even already handed the clay balls off to the stone mason in exchange for the fourteen emeralds they need.

And now, they’re standing on the threshold of the cartographer’s house, come to collect the final piece of their puzzle. The cartographer is staring at them silently—almost judgmentally, Ian thinks—from beside the small table by the wall. After a moment, Ian takes a hesitant step forward, ducking as he passes through the low doorway.

“We, uh, need a map to a woodland mansion, please,” he says.

“ _Hm_ ,” the villager replies, shuffling closer to them. Blinking expectantly at them from behind a rusted, chipped monocle concealing one green eye.

The villager’s dull stare pierces into Ian, and he shifts awkwardly, coughing slightly in his throat. “Uh, yeah,” he mumbles, and he reaches slowly for his bag at his hip, fumbling a little with the clasp. Then, just as he does, Luke catches his gaze from out of the corner of his vision. And when Ian turns to look at him full-on, he gives a heartfelt smile, to which Ian offers one of his own in return.

The two of them talked the whole, entire walk to the village. About a lot of different things, but mostly about this world and all the challenges that they’ve faced and all the ones they still have yet to meet. And to Ian’s surprise, it was actually a nice conversation. Luke held his hand and told him again that even though things are tough, they can still give it their best attempt and have a chance at coming out on top all the same. And somehow, the words had a different ring to them than they did just yesterday. They still felt unlikely, a mere shot in the dark, but not quite as coldly and obviously impossible as they did before. He—he doesn’t know why, really. Just that it was nice, and he enjoyed it.

…Maybe Ian should give the whole being-honest-with-his-feelings thing a second shot. Well, at least when it comes to Luke, that is. Although he knows she means well, Lucah’s still a little too intense and hungry to play therapist for him to feel comfortable divulging his deep, dark secrets to her quite yet. And McJones—well, even if he wasn’t on the brink of biting the big one, Ian’s pretty sure the two of them share total silent solidarity in hating talking about their feelings. He can’t imagine McJones ever sitting down and saying anything even remotely resembling _I see you’re sad, wanna talk about that?_ or even just _I’m sad_. Hexie, though, could be a good sounding board too, come to think of it. She tends to mewl intermittently whenever Ian’s talking to her, as if she’s voicing her agreement with whatever he’s saying to her. He could really use that kind of unconditional support.

His thoughts are digressing. But the point is, he’s quickly come to realize that he absolutely loves talking to Luke, no matter what the topic.

Luke. Luke, his literal, actual boyfriend, somehow.

Truthfully, they haven’t actually discussed outwardly what they, y’know, _are_ now. But they’ve kissed three times now, and Ian’s pretty sure that means _something,_ at least.

Luke’s way out of his league. It’s awesome.

The villager _hm_ s again, then, startling Ian from his reverie. With a sharp nod to himself, he yanks his bag all the way open and, one by one, pulls out the goods and balances them in his arms in a pile, being careful not to let anything drop.

“Fourteen emeralds and a compass,” he recites when he’s holding everything, letting his now much-emptier bag tumble to the ground. “All here.”

The villager raises an eyebrow—or, well, one half of a unibrow, that is—and scuttles forward, stopping only within a foot or so of Ian. Extends both arms, the sleeves of the long, brown robe swaying with the motion. Gingerly, Ian hands off the compass and the gleaming emeralds, the emeralds they worked so hard to earn and now are just trading away not five minutes after trading for them. But Ian has never felt such pure _relief_ watching the villager carry them and the compass off and put it all neatly inside a chest at the far end of the room. It’s an irrational feeling, he knows, stemming solely from the fact that they had to slave away digging up clay for, like, a _year_ just to get them. But he just really hates those fucking things a lot.

The villager rummages around in the chest for a moment, vague clanking and rattling sounds emanating from within. Then, the villager draws to a sudden stand, closes the chest with a _bang_ , and crosses back over to Ian and Luke. And holds out a rolled-up scroll held together by an elegant strip of silk fastened around the middle.

Delicately, almost feeling like he’s receiving a gift from the gods, Ian reaches out to accept the scroll. The villager’s fingers are nubby and clammy where they touch his hand, and Ian suppresses a slight shudder. Then, without hesitation, villager twists brusquely away, resuming work back at the cartography table as if Ian and Luke aren’t even there anymore.

“Uh, thanks,” Ian says, holding the scroll lightly in two hands.

“ _Hm_ ,” the villager says, not looking at them. Ian and Luke exchange a silent glance and then, together, turn around and file out of the house, back into the sunlight.

They make their way around to the back of the cartographer’s house to get some semblance of privacy from all the other villagers rushing about their village. “Hey, let’s check it out right now,” Luke suggests brightly as they come to a stop in the shadow of the small log cabin.

“Yeah, definitely.” No way is Ian walking all the way back home without checking to be sure this is an actual map and not just a piece of scrap paper with _Suck my villager dick, loser!_ written on it. Gently, he slides the silk tie up and off the roll, tucking it away in his pocket. Then, holding it out for Luke to see too, he slowly unfurls the scroll.

And it is, indeed, a map. It’s made of dark, slightly bleeding, clearly hand-drawn ink. It’s not too detailed, with just a bunch of simplistic shapes and lines meant to represent landmarks and geographical features. The only thing he recognizes on the entire map is what appears to be the very village they’re currently in, represented by no more than a handful of lopsided rectangles in the very bottom corner of the paper. Halfway across, too, is something that looks suspiciously like a range of mountains., and there’s also an innumerable amount of triangular trees covering the landmass.

But most importantly, right there, on the far side of the map, is a tiny red X.

It’s so small, Ian doesn’t notice it at first. But once he does, he just stares at it for a moment, taking it in. Trying to figure out what all this means for the three of them.

It’s north of here, for starters. It looks it’s going to be an awfully long journey, considering it takes them almost half a day just to get to this dumb village from their house. And that’s not to mention the fact that those mountains are standing directly and unavoidably in their path, and they’re definitely going to be an absolute _bitch_ to climb.

This is going to require some serious regrouping. They’re going to have to take stock of their food situation, definitely, because he could easily see this being a week-long journey. And they’re also gonna need even _more_ food on top of just regular meals for when they get beat up in the woodland mansion itself. Plus, their armor needs repairing too; they haven’t fixed any of it since _before_ they even went to the Nether. Food, weapons, armor, strategy, raw materials—there’s so many loose ends that they’re gonna be stuck dealing with over the next however-long-this-takes. They’ve certainly got their—

And Ian stops.

He stops dead, feeling his blood shudder to a halt in his veins and his heart freeze for a beat or three.

Because it’s finally hit him. All at once, it’s hit him. This—

This is what Luke was talking about, wasn’t it?

About him always taking charge and—and _leading_. He didn’t believe Luke for so long, thought Luke was just seeing this ridiculous, romanticized image of him. But this what he meant all along. Without even trying, without even _thinking_ about it, Ian’s brain has already started to plan. To run through all of the preparations they have to make before setting out. To think about exactly what they need to do and exactly how they’re going to do it. He didn’t need to force himself into it, he didn’t need to focus or think hard. It just kinda…happened.

Ian stares down at the map clutched in his fingers. He can’t quite describe the emotion that’s rolling through him. His surprised, certainly, but at the same time, he really…isn’t. Because it’s not like anything has really changed. He’s the same old guy he always was. It’s just that now, he’s looking at himself in a different light. Seeing the Ian that Luke claims to see. And, for the very first time, not hating the picture quite as much.

Maybe he _is_ their leader. He didn’t want to be a leader—he didn’t _plan_ on being one, certainly—but here he is anyway. It still doesn’t feel quite right calling himself that. But maybe it’s the truth. A truth he just has to learn to give into in time.

And then, right then, he starts to feel something akin to acceptance. To embracing his role. Slowly, he looks up, his eyes meeting Luke’s with a blink.

“That’s pretty far away, huh?” Luke says to him, tipping his chin towards the map.

“Yeah.”

Ian nods thoughtfully. The wind gusts through his hair, and he looks out onto the horizon in what he thinks is the direction of the woodland mansion, standing so far away from them, just waiting for them to come and storm its wooden walls.

It’s going to be hard. Really, _really_ fucking hard. They’re going to have to wrack their brains planning and pay attention to even the _tiniest_ of details getting ready for what lies ahead. They’re going to have to spend days upon days walking from sunup ‘till sundown, with nary a break to be had. And once they reach the mansion, they’re going to have to fight tooth and nail for any scrap of life they can hang onto.

But.

Even still.

Ian lets out a long breath that immediately gets swept away by the fierce winds. He shields his eyes, squinting up into the sky. His other hand reaches out for Luke’s, and Luke, understanding immediately, takes Ian’s palm in his and laces their fingers together.

“Y’know?” Ian starts, his voice hushed but growing stronger. “Maybe—maybe we can actually do this.”

\---

**Author's Note:**

> PHANTOMS ONLY SPAWN AT NIGHT I KNOW I'M SORRY USUALLY I'M SUPER METICULOUS WITH MY MINECRAFT DETAILS BUT I JUST KIND OF IGNORED THAT ONE FOR SOME REASON I'M SORRY
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this! Like I said, I had a lot of fun writing it! It's actually my first time writing Luke as well as brutaltown as a whole, so I hope I did them justice!
> 
> Also, kind of a fun fact is that shortly after I began writing this, me & cc & a few of our friends started a minecraft realm together, & we settled next to a village very near a swamp, where we gathered clay to trade for emeralds. I also located a witch hut with an abandoned black cat that I tamed & brought home. So that's a bunch of neat coincidences, & I actually have cc's permission to name our kitty _Hexie_ in-game the next time we're all online! and truly, I am Ian in this story in more ways than one.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


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